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GREEK STUDIES
MACMILLAN AND CO.. Limited
LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO
ATLANTA ■ SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA. Ltd.
TORONTO
GREEK STUDIES
A SERIES OF ESSAYS
BY
WALTER PATER
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1910
V
First Edition 1895
Edition de Luxe 1900
Second Edition 1901 ; Reprinted 1Q04, 1908
Library Edition 1910
PREFACE
The present volume consists of a collection of
essays by the late Mr. Pater, all of which have
already been given to the public in various
Magazines ; and it is owing to the kindness of
the several proprietors of those Magazines that
they can now be brought together in a collected
shape. It will, it is believed, be felt, that their
value is considerably enhanced by their appear-
ance in a single volume, where they can throw
light upon one another, and exhibit by their
connexion a more complete view of the scope
and purpose of Mr. Pater in dealing with the
art and literature of the ancient world.
The essays fall into two distinct groups, one
dealing with the subjects of Greek mythology
and Greek poetry, the other with the history of
Greek sculpture and Greek architecture. But
these two groups are not wholly distinct ; they
mutually illustrate one another, and serve to
enforce Mr. Pater's conception of the essential
B I
GREEK STUDIES
unity, in all its many-sidedness, of the Greek
character. The god understood as the "spiritual
form " of the things of nature is not only
the key-note of the " Study of Dionysus " ^ and
" The Myth of Demeter and Persephone," ^ but
reappears as contributing to the interpretation
of the growth of Greek sculpture.^ Thus,
though in the bibliography of his writings,
the two groups are separated by a considerable
interval, there is no change of view ; he had
already reached the centre of the problem, and,
the secret once gained, his mode of treatment
of the different aspects of Greek life and thought
is permanent and consistent.
The essay on "The Myth of Demeter and
Persephone " was originally prepared as two
lectures, for delivery, in 1875, at the Birmingham
and Midland Institute. These lectures were
published in the Fortnightly Review, in Jan. and
Feb. 1876. The "Study of Dionysus" appeared
in the same Review in Dec. 1876. "The
Bacchanals of Euripides " must have been
written about the same time, as a sequel to
the "Study of Dionysus"; for, in 1878, Mr.
Pater revised the four essays, with the intention,
apparently, of publishing them collectively in
a volume, an intention afterwards abandoned.
1 See p. 34. 2 See p. loo. ^ See pp. 220, 254.
2
PREFACE
The text now printed has, except that of "The
Bacchanals," been taken from proofs then set
up, further corrected in manuscript. " The
Bacchanals," written long before, was not pub-
lished until 1889, when it appeared in Mac-
mil Ian s Magazine for May. It was reprinted,
without alteration, prefixed to Dr. Tyrrell's
edition of the Bacchae. " Hippolytus Veiled "
first appeared in August 1889, in Macmillan*s
Magazine, It was afterwards rewritten, but
with only a few substantial alterations, in Mr.
Pater's own hand, with a view, probably, of
republishing it with other essays. This last
revise has been followed in the text now printed.
The papers on Greek sculpture ^ are all that
remain of a series which, if Mr. Pater had lived,
would, probably, have grown into a still more
important work. Such a work would have
included one or more essays on Phidias and the
Parthenon, of which only a fragment, though
an important fragment, can be found amongst his
papers ; and it was to have been prefaced by an
Introduction to Greek Studies, only a page or
two of which was ever written.
* " The Beginnings ot Greek Sculpture " was published in the
Fortnighly Review, Feb. and March 1880 ; "The Marbles of
iEgina" in the same Review in April. "The Age of Athletic
Prizemen " was published in the Contemporary Review in February
of the present year.
3
GREEK STUDIES
This is not the place to speak of Mr. Pater's
private virtues, the personal charm of his char-
acter, the brightness of his talk, the w^armth of
his friendship, the devotion of his family life.
But a few words may be permitted on the value
of the work by which he will be known to those
who never saw him.
Persons only superficially acquainted, or by
hearsay, with his writings, are apt to sum up his
merits as a writer by saying that he was a master,
or a consummate master of style ; but those who
have really studied what he wrote do not need
to be told that his distinction does not lie in his
literary grace alone, his fastidious choice of
language, his power of word-painting, but in
the depth and seriousness of his studies. That
the amount he has produced, in a literary life of
thirty years, is not greater, is one proof among
many of the spirit in which he worked. His
genius was "an infinite capacity for taking pains."
That delicacy of insight, that gift of penetrating
into the heart of things, that subtleness of inter-
pretation, which with him seems an instinct, is
the outcome of hard, patient, conscientious study.
If he had chosen, he might, without difficulty,
have produced a far greater body of work of less
value ; and from a worldly point of view, he
would have been wise. Such was not his under-
4
PREFACE
standing of the use of his talents. Cut multum
datum est^ multum quaeretur ab eo. Those who
wish to understand the spirit in which he worked,
will find it in this volume. C L S
0(t. 1894.
CONTENTS
rAGB
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS: THE SPIRITUAL FORM
OF FIRE AND DEW ....
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES .
THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE—
I
n. ...... .
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED : A STUDY FROM EURIPIDES
THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE—
I. THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART
II. THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES .
THE MARBLES OF ^GINA ....
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN: A CHAPTER
IN GREEK ART 269
9
51
gi
113
152
187
224
251
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FIRE AND DEW
Writers on mythology speak habitually of the
religion of the Greeks. In thus speaking, they
are really using a misleading expression, and
should speak rather of religions ; each race and
class of Greeks — the Dorians, the people of the
coast, the fishers — having had a religion of its
own, conceived of the objects that came nearest
to it and were most in its thoughts, and the
resulting usages and ideas never having come to
have a precisely harmonised system, after the
analogy of some other religions. The religion
of Dionysus is the religion of people who pass
their lives among the vines. As the religion of
Demeter carries us back to the cornfields and
farmsteads of Greece, and places us, in fancy,
among a primitive race, in the furrow and
beside the granary ; so the religion of Dionysus
carries us back to its vineyards, and is a
monument of the ways and thoughts of people
whose days go by beside the winepress, and
9
i
GREEK STUDIES
under the green and purple shadows, and whose
material happiness depends on the crop of grapes.
For them the thought of Dionysus and his circle,
a little Olympus outside the greater, covered the
whole of life, and was a complete religion, a
sacred representation or interpretation of the
whole human experience, modified by the special
limitations, the special privileges of insight or
suggestion, incident to their peculiar mode of
existence.
Now, if the reader wishes to understand what
the scope of the religion of Dionysus was to the
Greeks who lived in it, all it represented to
them by way of one clearly conceived yet com-
plex symbol, let him reflect what the loss would
be if all the effect and expression drawn from
the imagery of the vine and the cup fell out of
the whole body of existing poetry ; how many
fascinating trains of reflexion, what colour and
substance would therewith have been deducted
from it, filled as it is, apart from the more
aweful associations of the Christian ritual,
apart from Galahad's cup, with all the various
symbolism of the fruit of the vine. That
supposed loss is but an imperfect measure of all
that the name of Dionysus recalled to the Greek
mind, under a single imaginable form, an out-
ward body of flesh presented to the senses, and
comprehending, as its animating soul, a whole
world of thoughts, surmises, greater and less
experiences.
10
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
The student of the comparative science of
religions finds in the religion of Dionysus one of
many modes of that primitive tree-worship
which, growing out of some universal instinctive
belief that trees and flowers are indeed habita-
tions of living spirits, is found almost everywhere
in the earlier stages of civilisation, enshrined in
legend or custom, often graceful enough, as if
the delicate beauty of the object of worship had
effectually taken hold on the fancy of the
worshipper. Shelley's Sensitive Plant shows in
what mists of poetical reverie such feeling may
still float about a mind full of modern lights, the
feeling we too have of a life in the green
world, always ready to assert its claim over our
sympathetic fancies. Who has not at moments
felt the scruple, which is with us always regard-
ing animal life, following the signs of animation
further still, till one almost hesitates to pluck
out the little soul of flower or leaf.?
And in so graceful a faith the Greeks had
their share ; what was crude and inane in it
becoming, in the atmosphere of their energetic,
imaginative intelligence, refined and humanised.
The oak-grove of Dodona, the seat of their most
venerable oracle, did but perpetuate the fancy
that the sounds of the wind in the trees may be,
for certain prepared and chosen ears, intelligible
voices ; they could believe in the transmigration
of souls into mulberry and laurel, mint and
hyacinth ; and the dainty Metamorphoses of Ovid
1 1
GP.EEK STUDIES
are but a fossilised form of one morsel here and
there, from a whole world of transformation,
with which their nimble fancy was perpetually-
playing. "Together with them," says the
Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, of the Hama-
dryads, the nymphs which animate the forest
trees, " with them, at the moment of their birth,
grew up out of the soil, oak-tree or pine, fair,
flourishing among the mountains. And when at
last the appointed hour of their death has come,
first of all, those fair trees are dried up ; the
bark perishes from around them, and the branches
fall away ; and therewith the soul of them
deserts the light of the sun."
These then are the nurses of the vine, bracing
it with interchange of sun and shade. They
bathe, they dance, they sing songs of enchant-
ment, so that those who seem oddly in love with
nature, and strange among their fellows, are still
said to be nympholepti ; above all, they are
weavers or spinsters, spinning or weaving with
airiest fingers, and subtlest, many - coloured
threads, the foliage of the trees, the petals of
flowers, the skins of the fruit, the long thin
stalks on which the poplar leaves are set so lightly
that Homer compares to them, in their constant
motion, the maids who sit spinning in the house
of Alcinous. The nymphs of Naxos, where the
grape-skin is darkest, weave for him a purple
robe. Only, the ivy is never transformed, is
visible as natural ivy to the last, pressing the
12
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
dark outline of its leaves close upon the firm,
white, quite human flesh of the god's forehead.
In its earliest form, then, the religion of
Dionysus presents us with the most graceful
phase of this graceful worship, occupying a
place between the ruder fancies of half-civilised
people concerning life in flower or tree, and the
dreamy after-fancies of the poet of the Sensitive
Plant. He is the soul of the individual vine,
first ; the young vine at the house-door of the
newly married, for instance, as the vine-grower
stoops over it, coaxing and nursing it, like a pet
animal or a little child ; afterwards, the soul of
the whole species, the spirit of fire and dew,
alive and leaping in a thousand vines, as the
higher intelligence, brooding more deeply over
things, pursues, in thought, the generation of
sweetness and strength in the veins of the tree,
the transformation of water into wine, little by
little ; noting all the influences upon it of the
heaven above and the earth beneath ; and
shadowing forth, in each pause of the process,
an intervening person — what is to us but the
secret chemistry of nature being to them the
mediation of living spirits. So they passed on
to think of Dionysus (naming him at last from
the brightness of the sky and the moisture of
the earth) not merely as the soul of the vine,
but of all that life in flowing things of which
the vine is the symbol, because its most emphatic
example. At Delos he bears a son, from whom
13
GPvEEK STUDIES
in turn spring the three mysterious sisters CEno,
Spermo, and Elais, who, dwelling in the island,
exercise respectively the gifts of turning all
things at will into oil, and corn, and wine. In
the Baccha of Euripides, he gives his followers,
by miracle, honey and milk, and the water
gushes for them from the smitten rock. He
comes at last to have a scope equal to that of
Demeter, a realm as wide and mysterious as hers ;
the whole productive power of the earth is in
him, and the explanation of its annual change.
As some embody their intuitions of that power
in corn, so others in wine. He is the dispenser
of the earth's hidden wealth, giver of riches
through the vine, as Demeter through the grain.
And as Demeter sends the airy, dainty-wheeled
and dainty-winged spirit of Triptolemus to bear
her gifts abroad on all winds, so Dionysus goes
on his eastern journey, with its many intricate
adventures, on which he carries his gifts to
every people.
A little Olympus outside the greater^ I said, of
Dionysus and his companions ; he is the centre
of a cycle, the hierarchy of the creatures of water
and sunlight in many degrees ; and that fantastic
system of tree-worship places round him, not the
fondly whispering spirits of the more graceful
inhabitants of woodland only, the nymphs of the
poplar and the pine, but the whole satyr circle,
intervening between the headship of the vine
and the mere earth, the grosser, less human
14
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
spirits, incorporate and made visible, of the more
coarse and sluggish sorts of vegetable strength,
the fig, the reed, the ineradicable weed-things
which will attach themselves, climbing about
the vine-poles, or seeking the sun between the
hot stones. For as Dionysus, the spiritual form
of the vine, is of the highest human type, so the
fig-tree and the reed have animal souls, mistake-
able in the thoughts of a later, imperfectly re-
membering age, for mere abstractions of animal
nature ; Snubnose, and Sweetwine, and Silenus,
the oldest of them all, so old that he has come
to have the gift of prophecy.
Quite different from them in origin and intent,
but confused with them in form, are those other
companions of Dionysus, Pan and his children.
Home-spun dream of simple people, and like
them in the uneventful tenour of his existence,
he has almost no story ; he is but a presence ;
the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of
human life there ; the reflexion, in sacred image
or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild
honey ; the dangers of its hunters ; its weariness
in noonday heat ; its children, agile as the goats
they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags,
across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle
him, in the unfamiliar upper places ; its one
adornment and solace being the dance to the
homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan first from
the sedges of the brook Molpeia.
Breathing of remote nature, the sense of which
15
GREEK STUDIES
is so profound in the Homeric hymn to Pan,
the pines, the foldings of the hills, the leaping
streams, the strange echoings and dying of sound
on the heights, " the bird, which among the
petals of many-flowered spring, pouring out a
dirge, sends forth her honey-voiced song," " the
crocus and the hyacinth disorderly mixed in
the deep grass " — things which the religion of
Dionysus loves — Pan joins the company of the
Satyrs. Amongst them, they give their names
to insolence and mockery, and the finer sorts of
malice, to unmeaning and ridiculous fear. But
the best spirits have found in them also a certain
human pathos, as in displaced beings, coming
even nearer to most men, in their very rough-
ness, than the noble and delicate person of the
vine ; dubious creatures, half-way between the
animal and human kinds, speculating wistfully
on their being, because not wholly understanding
themselves and their place in nature ; as the
animals seem always to have this expression to
some noticeable degree in the presence of man.
In the later school of Attic sculpture they are
treated with more and more of refinement, till
in some happy moment Praxiteles conceived a
model, often repeated, which concentrates this
sentiment of true humour concerning them ; a
model of dainty natural ease in posture, but with
the legs slightly crossed, as only lowly-bred gods
are used to carry them, and with some puzzled
trouble of youth, you might wish for a moment
i6
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
to smoothe away, puckering the forehead a little,
between the pointed ears, on which the goodly
hair of his animal strength grows low. Little
by little, the signs of brute nature are subordin-
ated, or disappear ; and at last, Robetta, a humble
Italian engraver of the fifteenth century, entering
into the Greek fancy because it belongs to all
ages, has expressed it in its most exquisite form,
in a design of Ceres and her children, of whom
their mother is no longer afraid, as in the Homeric
hymn to Pan. The puck- noses have grown
delicate, so that, with Plato's infatuated lover,
you may call them winsome, if you please ; and
no one would wish those hairy little shanks away,
with which one of the small Pans walks at her
side, grasping her skirt stoutly ; while the other,
the sick or weary one, rides in the arms of Ceres
herself, who in graceful Italian dress, and decked
airily with fruit and corn, steps across a country
of cut sheaves, pressing it closely to her, with a
child's peevish trouble in its face, and its small
goat-legs and tiny hoofs folded over together,
precisely after the manner of a little child.
There is one element in the conception of
Dionysus, which his connexion with the satyrs,
Marsyas being one of them, and with Pan, from
whom the flute passed to all the shepherds of
Theocritus, alike illustrates, his interest, namely,
in one of the great species of music. One form
of that wilder vegetation, of which the Satyr
race is the soul made visible, is the reed, which
c 17
GREEK STUDIES
the creature plucks and trims into musical pipes.
And as Apollo inspires and rules over all the
music of strings, so Dionysus inspires and rules
over all the music of the reed, the w^ater-plant,
in which the ideas of w^ater and of vegetable life
are brought close together, natural property,
therefore, of the spirit of life in the green sap.
I said that the religion of Dionysus was, for those
who lived in it, a complete religion, a complete
sacred representation and interpretation of the
whole of life ; and as, in his relation to the vine,
he fills for them the place of Demeter, is the life
of the earth through the grape as she through
the grain, so, in this other phase of his being, in
his relation to the reed, he fills for them the place
of Apollo ; he is the inherent cause of music and
poetry ; he inspires ; he explains the phenomena
of enthusiasm, as distinguished by Plato in the
Phcedrus, the secrets of possession by a higher
and more energetic spirit than one's own, the
gift of self-revelation, of passing out of oneself
through words, tones, gestures. A winged
Dionysus, venerated at Amyclas, was perhaps
meant to represent him thus, as the god of en-
thusiasm, of the rising up on those spiritual
wings, of which also we hear something in the
Phcedrus of Plato.
The artists of the Renaissance occupied them-
selves much with the person and the story of
Dionysus ; and Michelangelo, in a work still
remaining in Florence, in which he essayed
i8
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
with success to produce a thing which should
pass with the critics for a piece of ancient
sculpture, has represented him in the fulness,
as it seems, of this enthusiasm, an image of de-
lighted, entire surrender to transporting dreams.
And this is no subtle after-thought of a later age,
but true to certain finer movements of old Greek
sentiment, though it may seem to have waited
for the hand of Michelangelo before it attained
complete realisation. The head of Ion leans, as
they recline at the banquet, on the shoulder of
Charmides ; he mutters in his sleep of things
seen therein, but awakes as the flute -players
enter, whom Charmides has hired for his birth-
day supper. The soul of Callias, who sits on
the other side of Charmides, flashes out ; he
counterfeits, with life-like gesture, the personal
tricks of friend or foe ; or the things he could
never utter before, he finds words for now ; the
secrets of life are on his lips. It is in this loosen-
ing of the lips and heart, strictly, that Dionysus
is the Deliverer, Eieutherios ; and of such enthusi-
asm, or ecstasy, is, in a certain sense, an older
patron than Apollo himself. Even at Delphi,
the centre of Greek inspiration and of the religion
of Apollo, his claim always maintained itself;
and signs are not wanting that Apollo was but a
later comer there. There, under his later reign,
hard by the golden image of Apollo himself, near
the sacred tripod on which the Pythia sat to
prophesy, was to be seen a strange object — a sort
19
GREEK STUDIES
of coffin or cinerary urn with the inscription,
" Here lieth the body of Dionysus, the son of
Semele." The pediment of the great temple
was divided between them — Apollo with the
nine Muses on that side, Dionysus, with perhaps
three times three Graces, on this. A third of
the whole year was held sacred to him ; the four
winter months were the months of Dionysus ; and
in the shrine of Apollo itself he was worshipped
with almost equal devotion.
The religion of Dionysus takes us back, then,
into that old Greek life of the vineyards, as we
see it on many painted vases, with much there
as we should find it now, as we see it in Bennozzo
Gozzoli's mediaeval fresco of the Invention of Wine
in the Campo Santo at Pisa — the family of Noah
presented among all the circumstances of a
Tuscan vineyard, around the press from which
the first wine is flowing, a painted idyll, with its
vintage colours still opulent in decay, and not
without its solemn touch of biblical symbolism.
For differences, we detect in that primitive life,
and under that Greek sky, a nimbler play of
fancy, lightly and unsuspiciously investing all
things with personal aspect and incident, and a
certain mystical apprehension, now almost de-
parted, of unseen powers beyond the material
veil of things, corresponding to the exceptional
vigour and variety of the Greek organisation.
This peasant life lies, in unhistoric time, behind
the definite forms with which poetry and a refined
20
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
priesthood afterwards clothed the religion of
Dionysus ; and the mere scenery and circum-
stances of the vineyard have determined many
things in its development. The noise of the
vineyard still sounds in some of his epithets,
perhaps in his best-known name — lacchus^
Bacchus. The masks suspended on base or
cornice, so familiar an ornament in later Greek
architecture, are the little faces hanging from the
vines, and moving in the wind, to scare the birds.
That garland of ivy, the aesthetic value of which
is so great in the later imagery of Dionysus and
his descendants, the leaves of which, floating
from his hair, become so noble in the hands of
Titian and Tintoret, w^as actually worn on the
head for coolness ; his earliest and most sacred
images were wrought in the wood of the vine.
The people of the vineyard had their feast, the
little or country Dionysia, which still lived on, side
by side with the greater ceremonies of a later
time, celebrated in December, the time of the
storing of the new wine. It was then that the
potters' fair came, calpis and amphora, together
with lamps against the winter, laid out in order
for the choice of buyers ; for Keramus, the
Greek Vase, is a son of Dionysus, of wine and of
Athene, who teaches men all serviceable and
decorative art. Then the goat was killed, and its
blood poured out at the root of the vines ; and
Dionysus literally drank the blood of goats ; and,
being Greeks, with quick and mobile sympathies,
21
GREEK STUDIES
Seta-LSaifiove^, "superstitious," or rather "susceptible
of religious impressions," some among them,
remembering those departed since last year, add
yet a little more, and a little wine and water for
the dead also ; brooding how the sense of these
things might pass below the roots, to spirits
hungry and thirsty, perhaps, in their shadowy
homes. But the gaiety, that gaiety which
Aristophanes in the Acharnians has depicted with
so many vivid touciies, as a thing of which civil
war had deprived the villages of Attica, pre-
ponderates over the grave. The travelling
country show comes round with its puppets ;
even the slaves have their holiday ; ^ the mirth
becomes excessive ; they hide their faces under
grotesque masks of bark, or stain them with
wine-lees, or potters' crimson even, like the old
rude idols painted red ; and carry in midnight
procession such rough symbols of the productive
force of nature as the women and children had
best not look upon ; which will be frowned upon,
and refine themselves, or disappear, in the feasts
of cultivated Athens.
Of the whole story of Dionysus, it was the
episode of his marriage with Ariadne about
which ancient art concerned itself oftenest, and
with most effect. Here, although the antiquarian
1 There were some who suspected Dionysus ot a secret demo-
cratic interest ; though indeed he was liberator only of men's hearts,
and i\f.vQ€fi(.v<i only because he never forgot Eleutherae, the little
place which, in Attica, first received him.
22
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
may still detect circumstances which link the
persons and incidents of the legend with the
mystical life of the earth, as symbols of its
annual change, yet the merely human interest of
the story has prevailed over its earlier significance ;
the spiritual form of fire and dew has become a
romantic lover. And as a story of romantic love,
fullest perhaps of all the motives of classic legend
of the pride of life, it survived with undiminished
interest to a later world, two of the greatest
masters of Italian painting having poured their
whole power into it ; Titian with greater space
of ingathered shore and mountain, and solemn
foliage, and fiery animal life ; Tintoret with
profounder luxury of delight in the nearness to
each other, and imminent embrace, of glorious
bodily presences ; and both alike with consum-
mate beauty of physical form. Hardly less
humanised is the Theban legend of Dionysus, the
legend of his birth from Semele, which, out of
the entire body of tradition concerning him, was
accepted as central by the Athenian imagination.
For the people of Attica, he comes from Boeotia,
a country of northern marsh and mist, but from
whose sombre, black marble towns came also the
vine, the musical reed cut from its sedges, and
the worship of the Graces, always so closely con-
nected with the religion of Dionysus. " At
Thebes alone," says Sophocles, " mortal women
bear immortal gods." His mother is the
daughter of Cadmus, himself marked out by
23
GREEK STUDIES
many curious circumstances as the close kinsman
of the earth, to which he all but returns at last,
as the serpent, in his old age, attesting some
closer sense lingering there of the affinity of man
with the dust from whence he came. Semele, an
old Greek word, as it seems, for the surface of the
earth, the daughter of Cadmus, beloved by Zeus,
desires to see her lover in the glory with which
he is seen by the immortal Hera. He appears
to her in lightning. But the mortal may not
behold him and live. Semele gives premature
birth to the child Dionysus ; whom, to preserve
it from the jealousy of Hera, Zeus hides in a part
of his thigh, the child returning into the loins of
its father, whence in due time it is born again.
Yet in this fantastic story, hardly less than in the
legend of Ariadne, the story of Dionysus has
become a story of human persons, with human
fortunes, and even more intimately human appeal
to sympathy ; so that Euripides, pre-eminent as
a poet of pathos, finds in it a subject altogether
to his mind. All the interest now turns on the
development of its points of moral or sentimental
significance ; the love of the immortal for the
mortal, the presumption of the daughter of man
who desires to see the divine form as it is ; on the
fact that not without loss of sight, or life itself,
can man look upon it. The travail of nature has
been transformed into the pangs of the human
mother ; and the poet dwells much on the
pathetic incident of death in childbirth, making
24
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
Dionysus, as Callimachus calls him, a seven
months' child, cast out among its enemies,
motherless. And as a consequence of this human
interest, the legend attaches itself, as in an actual
history, to definite sacred objects and places, the
venerable relic of the wooden image which fell
into the chamber of Semele with the lightning-
flash, and which the piety of a later age covered
with plates of brass ; the Ivy-Fountain near
Thebes, the water of which was so wonderfully
bright and sweet to drink, where the nymphs
bathed the new-born child ; the grave of Semele,
in a sacred enclosure grown with ancient vines,
where some volcanic heat or flame was perhaps
actually traceable, near the lightning-struck ruins
of her supposed abode.
Yet, though the mystical body of the earth is
forgotten in the human anguish of the mother of
Dionysus, the sense of his essence of fire and dew
still lingers in his most sacred name, as the son
of Semele, Dkhyrambus. We speak of a certain
wild music in words or rhythm as dithyrambic^
like the dithyrambus, that is, the wild choral-
singing of the worshippers of Dionysus. But
Dithyrambus seems to have been, in the first
instance, the name, not of the hymn, but of the
god to whom the hymn is sung ; and, through
a tangle of curious etymological speculations as
to the precise derivation of this name, one thing
seems clearly visible, that it commemorates,
namely, the double birth of the vine-god ; that
25
GREEK STUDIES
he is born once and again ; his birth, first of fire,
and afterwards of dew ; the two dangers that
beset him ; his victory over two enemies, the
capricious, excessive heats and colds of spring.
He is TTvptyevri^i, then, fire -born, the son of
lightning ; lightning being to light, as regards
concentration, what wine is to the other strengths
of the earth. And who that has rested a hand
on the glittering silex of a vineyard slope in
August, where the pale globes of sweetness are
lying, does not feel this ? It is out of the bitter
salts of a smitten, volcanic soil that it comes up
with the most curious virtues. The mother
faints and is parched up by the heat which
brings the child to the birth ; and it pierces
through, a wonder of freshness, drawing its
everlasting green and typical coolness out of
the midst of the ashes ; its own stem becoming
at last like a tangled mass of tortured metal. In
thinking of Dionysus, then, as fire-born, the
Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment,
the poetry, of all tender things which grow out
of a hard soil, or in any sense blossom before the
leaf, like the little mezereon-plant of English
gardens, with its pale-purple, wine-scented flowers
upon the leafless twigs in February, or like the
almond-trees of Tuscany, or Aaron's rod that
budded, or the staff in the hand of the Pope
when Tannhauser's repentance is accepted.
And his second birth is of the dew. The
fire of which he was born would destroy him in
26
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
his turn, as it withered up his mother ; a second
danger comes ; from this the plant is protected
by the influence of the coohng cloud, the lower
part of his father the sky, in which it is wrapped
and hidden, and of which it is born again, its
second mother being, in some versions of the
legend, Hye — the Dew. The nursery, where
Zeus places it to be brought up, is a cave in
Mount Nysa, sought by a misdirected ingenuity
in many lands, but really, like the place of the
carrying away of Persephone, a place of fantasy,
the oozy place of springs in the hollow of the
hillside, nowhere and everywhere, where the
vine was " invented." The nymphs of the trees
overshadow it from above ; the nymphs of the
springs sustain it from below — the Hyades, those
first leaping monads, who, as the springs become
rain-clouds, go up to heaven among the stars,
and descend again, as dew or shower, upon it ;
so that the religion of Dionysus connects itself,
not with tree-worship only, but also with ancient
water-worship, the worship of the spiritual forms
of springs and streams. To escape from his
enemies Dionysus leaps into the sea, the original
of all rain and springs, whence, in early summer,
the women of Elis and Argos were wont to call
him, with the singing of a hymn. And again,
in thus commemorating Dionysus as born of the
dew, the Greeks apprehend and embody the
sentiment, the poetry, of water. For not the
heat only, but its solace — the freshness of the
27
GREEK STUDIES
cup — this too was felt by those people of the
vineyard, whom the prophet Melampus had
taught to mix always their wine with water, and
with whom the watering of the vines became a
religious ceremony ; the very dead, as they
thought, drinking of and refreshed by the
stream. And who that has ever felt the heat
of a southern country does not know this poetry,
the motive of the loveliest of all the works
attributed to Giorgioiie, the Fete Champetre in
the Louvre ; the intense sensations, the subtle
and far-reaching symbolisms, which, in these
places, cling about the touch and sound and
sight of it ? Think of the darkness of the well
in the breathless court, with the delicate ring of
ferns kept alive just within the opening ; of the
sound of the fresh water flowing through the
wooden pipes into the houses of Venice, on
summer mornings ; of the cry Acqua fresca I at
Padua or Verona, when the people run to buy
what they prize, in its rare purity, more than
wine, bringing pleasures so full of exquisite
appeal to the imagination, that, in these streets,
the very beggars, one thinks, might exhaust all
the philosophy of the epicurean.
Out of all these fancies comes the vine-
growers' god, the spiritual form of fire and dew.
Beyond the famous representations of Dionysus
in later art and poetry — the Bacchanals of
Euripides, the statuary of the school of Praxiteles
— a multitude of literary allusions and local
28
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
customs carry us back to this world of vision
unchecked by positive knowledge, in which the
myth is begotten among a primitive people, as they
wondered over the life of the thing their hands
helped forward, till it became for them a kind
of spirit, and their culture of it a kind of worship.
Dionysus, as we see him in art and poetry, is the
projected expression of the ways and dreams of
this primitive people, brooded over and harmon-
ised by the energetic Greek imagination ; the
religious imagination of the Greeks being, pre-
cisely, a unifying or identifying power, bringing
together things naturally asunder, making, as it
were, for the human body a soul of waters, for
the human soul a body of flowers ; welding into
something like the identity of a human person-
ality the whole range of man's experiences of
a given object, or series of objects — all their
outward qualities, and the visible facts regarding
them — all the hidden ordinances by which those
facts and qualities hold of unseen forces, and have
their roots in purely visionary places.
Dionysus came later than the other gods to
the centres of Greek life ; and, as a consequence
of this, he is presented to us in an earlier stage
of development than they ; that element of
natural fact which is the original essence of all
mythology being more unmistakeably impressed
upon us here than in other myths. Not the
least interesting point in the study of him is,
that he illustrates very clearly, not only the
29
GREEK STUDIES
earlier, but also a certain later influence of this
element of natural fact, in the development of
the gods of Greece. For the physical sense,
latent in it, is the clue, not merely to the original
signification of the incidents of the divine story,
but also to the source of the peculiar imaginative
expression Vv^hich its persons subsequently retain,
in the forms of the higher Greek sculpture.
And this leads me to some general thoughts on
the relation of Greek sculpture to mythology,
which may help to explain what the function of
the imagination in Greek sculpture really was,
in its handling of divine persons.
That Zeus is, in earliest, original, primitive
intention, the open sky, across which the thunder
sometimes sounds, and from which the rain
descends — is a fact which not only explains the
various stories related concerning him, but de-
termines also the expression which he retained
in the work of Pheidias, so far as it is possible
to recall it, long after the growth of those later
stories had obscured, for the minds of his wor-
shippers, his primary signification. If men felt,
as Arrian tells us, that it was a calamity to die
without having seen the Zeus of Olympia ; that
was because they experienced the impress there
of that which the eye and the whole being of
man love to find above him ; and the genius of
Pheidias had availed to shed, upon the gold and
ivory of the physical form, the blandness, the
breadth, the smile of the open sky ; the mild
30
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
heat of it still coming and going, in the face of
the father of all the children of sunshine and
shower ; as if one of the great white clouds had
composed itself into it, and looked down upon
them thus, out of the midsummer noonday : so
that those things might be felt as warm, and
fresh, and blue, by the young and the old, the
weak and the strong, who came to sun them-
selves in the god's presence, as procession and
hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and tranquil
courts of the great Olympian temple ; while all
the time those people consciously apprehended
in the carved image of Zeus none but the
personal, and really human, characteristics.
Or think, again, of the Zeus of Dodona.
The oracle of Dodona, with its dim grove of
oaks, and sounding instruments of brass to
husband the faintest whisper in the leaves, was
but a great consecration of that sense of a
mysterious will, of which people still feel, or
seem to feel, the expression, in the motions of
the wind, as it comes and goes, and which
makes it, indeed, seem almost more than a mere
symbol of the spirit within us. For Zeus was,
indeed, the god of the winds also ; iEolus, their
so-called god, being only his mortal minister, as
having come, by long study of them, through
signs in the fire and the like, to have a certain
communicable skill regarding them, in relation
to practical uses. Now, suppose a Greek
sculptor to have proposed to himself to present
31
GREEK STUDIES
to his worshippers the image of this Zeus of
Dodona, who is in the trees and on the currents
of the air. Then, if he had been a really
imaginative sculptor, working as Pheidias worked,
the very soul of those moving, sonorous creatures
would have passed through his hand, into the
eyes and hair of the image ; as they can actually
pass into the visible expression of those who have
drunk deeply of them ; as we may notice, some-
times, in our walks on mountain or shore.
Victory again — Nike — associated so often with
Zeus — on the top of his staff, on the foot of his
throne, on the palm of his extended hand —
meant originally, mythologic science tells us,
only the great victory of the sky, the triumph
of morning over darkness. But that physical
morning of her origin has its ministry to the
later aesthetic sense also. For if Nike, when she
appears in company with the mortal, and wholly
fleshly hero, in whose chariot she stands to guide
the horses, or whom she crowns with her garland
of parsley or bay, or whose names she writes on a
shield, is imaginatively conceived, it is because the
old skyey influences are still not quite suppressed
in her clear-set eyes, and the dew of the morning
still clings to her wings and her floating hair.
The office of the imagination, then, in Greek
sculpture, in its handling of divine persons, is
thus to condense the impressions of natural
things into human form ; to retain that early
mystical sense of water, or wind, or light, in the
32
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
moulding of eye and brow ; to arrest it, or rather,
perhaps, to set it free, there, as human expression.
The body of man, indeed, was for the Greeks,
still the genuine work of Prometheus ; its con-
nexion with earth and air asserted in many a
legend, not shaded down, as with us, through
innumerable stages of descent, but direct and im-
mediate ; in precise contrast to our physical theory
of our life, which never seems to fade, dream
over it as we will, out of the light of common
day. The oracles with their messages to human
intelligence from birds and springs of water, or
vapours of the earth, were a witness to that con-
nexion. Their story went back, as they believed,
with unbroken continuity, and in the very places
where their later life was lived, to a past, stretch-
ing beyond, yet continuous with, actual memory,
in which heaven and earth mingled ; to those
who were sons and daughters of stars, and streams,
and dew ; to an ancestry of grander men and
women, actually clothed in, or incorporate with,
the qualities and influences of those objects ; and
we can hardly over-estimate the influence on
the Greek imagination of this mythical connexion
with the natural world, at not so remote a date,
and of the solemnising power exercised thereby
over their thoughts. In this intensely poetical
situation, the historical Greeks, the Athenians of
the age of Pericles, found themselves ; it was as
if the actual roads on which men daily walk,
went up and on, into a visible wonderland.
D 33
GREEK STUDIES
With such habitual impressions concerning
the body, the physical nature of man, the Greek
sculptor, in his later day, still free in imagination,
through the lingering influence of those early
dreams, may have more easily infused into human
form the sense of sun, or lightning, or cloud,
to which it was so closely akin, the spiritual
flesh allying itself happily to mystical meanings,
and readily expressing seemingly unspeakable
qualities. But the human form is a limiting
influence also ; and in proportion as art im-
pressed human form, in sculpture or in the
drama, on the vaguer conceptions of the Greek
mind, there was danger of an escape from them
of the free spirit of air, and light, and sky.
Hence, all through the history of Greek art,
there is a struggle, a Streben^ as the Germans
say, between the palpable and limited human
form, and the floating essence it is to contain.
On the one hand, was the teeming, still fluid
world, of old beliefs, as we see it reflected in
the somewhat formless theogony of Hesiod ; a
world, the Titanic vastness of which is congruous
with a certain sublimity of speech, when he has
to speak, for instance, of motion or space ; as the
Greek language itself has a primitive copious-
ness and energy of words, for wind, fire, water,
cold, sound — attesting a deep susceptibility to the
impressions of those things — yet with edges, most
often, melting into each other. On the other
hand, there was that limiting, controlling tendency,
34
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
identified with the Dorian influence in the history
of the Greek mind, the spirit of a severe and
wholly self- conscious intelligence ; bent on
impressing everywhere, in the products of the
imagination, the definite, perfectly conceivable
human form, as the only worthy subject of art ;
less in sympathy with the mystical genealogies
of Hesiod, than with the heroes of Homer, end-
ing in the entirely humanised religion of Apollo,
the clearly understood humanity of the old Greek
warriors in the marbles of iEgina. The represent-
ation of man, as he is or might be, became the
aim of sculpture, and the achievement of this
the subject of its whole history ; one early carver
had opened the eyes, another the lips, a third
had given motion to the feet ; in various ways,
in spite of the retention of archaic idols, the
genuine human expression had come, with the
truthfulness of life itself.
These two tendencies, then, met and struggled
and were harmonised in the supreme imagina-
tion, of Pheidias, in sculpture — of iEschylus, in
the drama. Hence, a series of wondrous person-
alities, of which the Greek imagination became
the dwelling-place ; beautiful, perfectly under-
stood human outlines, embodying a strange,
delightful, lingering sense of clouds and water
and sun. Such a world, the world of really
imaginative Greek sculpture, we still see, re-
flected in many a humble vase or battered
coin, in Bacchante, and Centaur, and Amazon ;
35
GREEK STUDIES
evolved out of that " vasty deep *' ; with most
command, in the consummate fragments of the
Parthenon ; not, indeed, so that he who runs
may read, the gifts of Greek sculpture being
always delicate, and asking much of the receiver ;
but yet visible, and a pledge to us, of creative
power, as, to the worshipper, of the presence,
which, without that material pledge, had but
vaguely haunted the fields and groves.
This, then, was what the Greek imagination
did for men's sense and experience of natural
forces, in Athene, in Zeus, in Poseidon ; for
men's sense and experience of their own bodily
qualities — swiftness, energy, power of concen-
trating sight and hand and foot on a momentary
physical act — in the close hair, the chastened
muscle, the perfectly poised attention of the
quoit-player; for men's sense, again, of ethical
qualities — restless idealism, inward vision, power
of presence through that vision in scenes behind
the experience of ordinary men — in the idealised
Alexander.
To illustrate this function of the imagination,
as especially developed in Greek art, we may
reflect on what happens with us in the use of
certain names, as expressing summarily, this
name for you and that for me. — Helen, Gretchen,
Mary — a hundred associations, trains of sound,
forms, impressions, remembered in all sorts of
degrees, which, through a very wide and full
experience, they have the power of bringing with
36
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
them ; in which respect, such names are hut
revealing instances of the whole significance,
power, and use of language in general. Well, —
the mythical conception, projected at last, in
drama or sculpture, is the name^ the instrument
of the identification, of the given matter, — of
its unity in variety, its outline or definition in
mystery ; its spiritual form^ to use again the
expression I have borrowed from William Blake
— form, with hands, and lips, and opened eyelids
— spiritual, as conveying to us, in that, the soul of
rain, or of a Greek river, or of swiftness, or purity.
To illustrate this, think what the effect would
be, if you could associate, by some trick of
memory, a certain group of natural objects, in all
their varied perspective, their changes of colour
and tone in varying light and shade, with the
being and image of an actual person. You
travelled through a country of clear rivers and
wide meadows, or of high windy places, or of
lowly grass and willows, or of the Lady of the
Lake; and all the complex impressions of these
objects wound themselves, as a second animated
body, new and more subtle, around the person
of some one left there, so that they no longer
come to recollection apart from each other. Now
try to conceive the image of an actual person, in
whom, somehow, all those impressions of the
vine and its fruit, as the highest type of the life
of the green sap, had become incorporate ; — all
the scents and colours of its flower and fruit, and
37
GREEK STUDIES
something of its curling foliage ; the chances of
its growth ; the enthusiasm, the easy flow of more
choice expression, as its juices mount within one ;
for the image is eloquent, too, in word, gesture,
and glancing of the eyes, which seem to be
informed by some soul of the vine within it : as
Wordsworth says.
Beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face —
so conceive an image into which the beauty,
" born " of the vine, has passed ; and you have
the idea of Dionysus, as he appears, entirely
fashioned at last by central Greek poetry and
art, and is consecrated in the Olvo(f>6pia and the
* KvOearripLa, the great festivals of the Winepress
and the Flowers,
The word wine, and with it the germ of the
myth of Dionysus, is older than the separation of
the Indo-Germanic race. Yet, with the people
of Athens, Dionysus counted as the youngest of
the gods ; he was also the son of a mortal, dead
in childbirth, and seems always to have exercised
the charm of the latest born, in a sort of allowable
fondness. Through the fine-spun speculations of
modern ethnologists and grammarians, noting the
changes in the letters of his name, and catching
at the slightest historical records of his worship,
we may trace his coming from Phrygia, the
birthplace of the more mystical elements of
38
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
Greek religion, over the mountains of Thrace.
On the heights of Pangaeus he leaves an oracle,
with a perpetually burning fire, famous down
to the time of Augustus, who reverently visited
it. Southwards still, over the hills of Parnassus,
which remained for the inspired women of
Boeotia the centre of his presence, he comes
to Thebes, and the family of Cadmus. From
Boeotia he passes to Attica ; to the villages first ;
at last to Athens ; at an assignable date, under
Peisistratus ; out of the country, into the town.
To this stage of his town-life, that Dionysus
of " enthusiasm " already belonged ; it was to
the Athenians of the town, to urbane young
men, sitting together at the banquet, that those
expressions of a sudden eloquence came, of the
loosened utterance and finer speech, its colour and
imagery. Dionysus, then, has entered Athens,
to become urbane like them ; to walk along the
marble streets in frequent procession, in the
persons of noble youths, like those who at the
Oschophoria bore the branches of the vine from
his temple, to the temple oi Athene of the Parasol^
or of beautiful slaves ; to contribute through the
arts to the adornment of life, yet perhaps also
in part to weaken it, relaxing ancient austerity.
Gradually, his rough country feasts will be out-
done by the feasts of the town ; and as comedy
arose out of those, so these will give rise to
tragedy. For his entrance upon this new stage of
his career, his coming into the town, is from the
39
GREEK STUDIES
first tinged with melancholy, as if in entering
the town he had put off his country peace. The
other Olympians are above sorrow. Dionysus,
like a strenuous mortal hero, like Hercules or
Perseus, has his alternations of joy and sorrow,
of struggle and hard-won triumph. It is out of
the sorrows of Dionysus, then, — of Dionysus in
winter — that all Greek tragedy grows ; out of
the song of the sorrows of Dionysus, sung at his
winter feast by the chorus of satyrs, singers clad
in goat-skins, in memory of his rural life, one
and another of whom, from time to time, steps
out of the company to emphasise and develope
this or that circumstance of the story ; and so
the song becomes dramatic. He will soon forget
that early country life, or remember it but as
the dreamy background of his later existence.
He will become, as always in later art and poetry,
of dazzling whiteness ; no longer dark with the
air and sun, but like one eV/cmr/jo^T/zcw? — brought up
under the shade of Eastern porticoes or pavilions,
or in the light that has only reached him softened
through the texture of green leaves ; honey-pale,
like the delicate people of the city, like the
flesh of women, as those old vase-painters con-
ceive of it, v/ho leave their hands and faces un-
touched with the pencil on the white clay. The
ruddy god of the vineyard, stained with wine-
lees, or coarser colour, will hardly recognise his
double, in the white, graceful, mournful figure,
weeping, chastened, lifting up his arms in yearn-
40
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
ing affection towards his late-found mother, as we
sec him on a famous Etruscan mirror. Only, in
thinking of this early tragedy, of these town-
feasts, and of the entrance of Dionysus into
Athens, you must suppose, not the later Athens
which is oftenest in our thoughts, the Athens of
Pericles and Pheidias ; but that little earlier
Athens of Peisistratus, which the Persians
destroyed, which some of us perhaps would
rather have seen, in its early simplicity, than the
greater one ; when the old image of the god,
carved probably out of the stock of an enormous
vine, had just come from the village of Eleuthers
to his first temple in the Lenceum — the quarter
of the winepresses, near the Limna — the marshy
place, which in Athens represents the cave of
Nysa ; its little buildings on the hill-top, still
with steep rocky ways, crowding round the
ancient temple of Erechtheus and the grave of
Cecrops, with the old miraculous olive-tree still
growing there, and the old snake of Athene
Polias still alive somewhere in the temple court.
The artists of the Italian Renaissance have
treated Dionysus many times, and with great
effect, but always in his joy, as an embodiment of
that glory of nature to which the Renaissance
was a return. But in an early engraving of
Mocetto there is for once a Dionysus treated
differently. The cold light of the background
displays a barren hill, the bridge and towers of
41
GREEK STUDIES
an Italian town, and quiet water. In the fore-
ground, at the root of a vine, Dionysus is sitting,
in a posture of statuesque weariness ; the leaves
of the vine are grandly drawn, and wreathing
heavily round the head of the god, suggest the
notion of his incorporation into it. The right
hand, holding a great vessel languidly and in-
differently, lets the stream of wine flow along
the earth ; while the left supports the forehead,
shadowing heavily a face, comely, but full of an
expression of painful brooding. One knows not
how far one may really be from the mind of the
old Italian engraver, in gathering from his
design this impression of a melancholy and
sorrowing Dionysus. But modern motives are
clearer ; and in a Bacchus by a young Hebrew
painter, in the exhibition of the Royal Academy
of 1868, there was a complete and very fascinat-
ing realisation of such a motive ; the god of the
bitterness of wine, " of things too sweet " ; the
sea-water of the Lesbian grape become some-
what brackish in the cup. Touched by the
sentiment of this subtler, melancholy Dionysus,
we may ask whether anything similar in feeling is
to be actually found in the range of Greek ideas ;
— had some antitype of this fascinating figure
any place in Greek religion P Yes ; in a certain
darker side of the double god of nature, obscured
behind the brighter episodes of Thebes and
Naxos, but never quite forgotten, something
corresponding to this deeper, more refined idea,
42
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
really existed — the conception of Dionysus
Zagreus ; an image, which has left, indeed, but
little effect in Greek art and poetry, which
criticism has to put patiently together, out of
late, scattered hints in various writers ; but
which is yet discernible, clearly enough to show
that it really visited certain Greek minds here
and there ; and discernible, not as a late after-
thought, but as a tradition really primitive, and
harmonious with the original motive of the idea
of Dionysus. In its potential, though unrealised
scope, it is perhaps the subtlest dream in Greek
religious poetry, and is, at least, part of the
complete physiognomy of Dionysus, as it actually
reveals itself to the modern student, after a
complete survey.
The whole compass of the idea of Dionysus,
a dual god of both summer and winter, became
ultimately, as we saw, almost identical with that
of Demeter. The Phrygians believed that the
god slept in winter and awoke in summer, and
celebrated his waking and sleeping ; or that he
was bound and imprisoned in winter, and un-
bound in spring. We saw how, in Elis and at
Argos, the women called him out of the sea,
with the singing of hymns, in early spring ; and
a beautiful ceremony in the temple at Delphi,
which, as we know, he shares with Apollo,
described by Plutarch, represents his mystical
resurrection. Yearly, about the time of the
shortest day, just as the light begins to increase,
43
GREEK STUDIES
and while hope is still tremulously strung, the
priestesses of Dionysus were wont to assemble
with many lights at his shrine, and there, with
songs and dances, awoke the new-born child
after his wintry sleep, waving in a sacred cradle,
like the great basket used for winnowing corn, a
symbolical image, or perhaps a real infant. He
is twofold then — a D'dppelganger ; like Perse-
phone, he belongs to two worlds, and has much
in common with her, and a full share of those
dark possibilities which, even apart from the story
of the rape, belong to her. He is a Chthonian
god, and, like all the children of the earth, has
an element of sadness ; like Hades himself, he is
hollow and devouring, an eater of man's flesh —
sarcophagus — the grave which consumed unaware
the ivory-white shoulder of Pelops.
And you have no sooner caught a glimpse of
this image, than a certain perceptible shadow
comes creeping over the whole story ; for, in
effect, we have seen glimpses of the sorrowing
Dionysus, all along. Part of the interest of the
Theban legend of his birth is that he comes of
the marriage of a god with a mortal woman ;
and from the first, like merely mortal heroes, he
falls within the sphere of human chances. At
first, indeed, the melancholy settles round the
person of his mother, dead in childbirth, and
ignorant of the glory of her son ; in shame,
according to Euripides ; punished, as her own
sisters allege, for impiety. The death of Semele
44
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
is a sort of ideal or type of this peculiar claim
on human pity, as the descent of Persephone
into Hades, of all human pity over the early
death of women. Accordingly, his triumph
being now consummated, he descends into
Hades, through the unfathomable Alcyonian
lake, according to the most central version of
the legend, to bring her up from thence ; and
that Hermes, the shadowy conductor of souls, is
constantly associated with Dionysus, in the story
of his early life, is not without significance in
this connexion. As in Delphi the winter
months were sacred to him, so in Athens his
feasts all fall within the four months on this and
the other side of the shortest day ; as Persephone
spends those four months — a third part of the
year — in Hades. Son or brother of Persephone
he actually becomes at last, in confused, half-
developed tradition ; and even has his place,
with his dark sister, in the Eleusinian mysteries,
as lacchus ; where, on the sixth day of the feast,
in the great procession from Athens to Eleusis,
we may still realise his image, moving up and
down above the heads of the vast multitude, as
he goes, beside " the two" to the temple of
Demeter, amid the light of torches at noonday.
But it was among the mountains of Thrace
that this gloomier element in the being of
Dionysus had taken the strongest hold. As in
the sunny villages of Attica the cheerful elements
of his religion had been developed, so, in those
45
GREEK STUDIES
wilder northern regions, people continued to
brood over its darker side, and hence a current
of gloomy legend descended into Greece. The
subject of the Bacchanals of Euripides is the in-
fatuated opposition of Pentheus, king of Thebes,
to Dionysus and his religion ; his cruelty to the
god, whom he shuts up in prison, and who
appears on the stage with his delicate limbs
cruelly bound, but who is finally triumphant ;
Pentheus, the man of grief, being torn to pieces
by his own mother, in the judicial madness sent
upon her by the god. In this play, Euripides
has only taken one of many versions of the same
story, in all of which Dionysus is victorious, his
enemy being torn to pieces by the sacred women,
or by wild horses, or dogs, or the fangs of cold ;
or the maenad Ambrosia, whom he is supposed to
pursue for purposes of lust, suddenly becomes a
vine, and binds him down to the earth inex-
tricably, in her serpentine coils.
In all these instances, then, Dionysus punishes
his enemies by repaying them in kind. But a
deeper vein of poetry pauses at the sorrow, and
irk the conflict does not too soon anticipate the
final triumph. It is Dionysus himself who
exhausts these sufferings. Hence, in many forms
— reflexes of all the various phases of his wintry
existence — the image of Dionysus Zagreus, the
Hunter — of Dionysus in winter — storming wildly
on the dark Thracian hills, from which, like
Ares and Boreas, he originally descends into
46
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
Greece ; the thought of the hunter concentrat-
ing into itself all men's forebodings over the
departure of the year at its richest, and the death
of all sweet things in the long-continued cold,
when the sick and the old and little children,
gazing out morning after morning on the dun
sky, can hardly believe in the return any more
of a bright day. Or he is connected with the
fears, the dangers and hardships of the hunter
himself, lost or slain sometimes, far from home,
in the dense woods of the mountains, as he seeks
his meat so ardently ; becoming, in his chase,
almost akin to the wild beasts — to the wolf, who
comes before us in the name of Lycurgus, one of
his bitterest enemies — and a phase, therefore, of
his own personality, in the true intention of the
myth. This transformation, this image of the
beautiful soft creature become an enemy of
human kind, putting off himself in his madness,
wronged by his own fierce hunger and thirst,
and haunting, with terrible sounds, the high
Thracian farms, is the most tragic note of the
whole picture, and links him on to one of the
gloomiest creations of later romance, the were-
wolf, the belief in which still lingers in Greece,
as in France, where it seems to become in-
corporate in the darkest of all romantic histories,
that of Gilles de Retz.
And now we see why the tradition of human
sacrifice lingered on in Greece, in connexion
with Dionysus, as a thing of actual detail, and
47
GREEK STUDIES
not remote, so that Dionysius of Halicarnassus
counts it among the horrors of Greek religion.
That the sacred women of Dionysus ate, in
mystical ceremony, raw flesh, and drank blood,
is a fact often mentioned, and commemorates, as
it seems, the actual sacrifice of a fair boy deliber-
ately torn to pieces, fading at last into a symbolical
offering. At Delphi, the wolf was preserved for
him, on the principle by which Venus loves the
dove, and Hera peacocks ; and there were places
in which, after the sacrifice of a kid to him, a
curious mimic pursuit of the priest who had
offered it represented the still surviving horror
of one who had thrown a child to the wolves.
The three daughters of Minyas devote themselves
to his worship ; they cast lots, and one of them
offers her own tender infant to be torn by the
three, like a roe ; then the other women pursue
them, and they are turned into bats, or moths,
or other creatures of the night. And fable is
endorsed by history ; Plutarch telling us how,
before the battle of Salamis, with the assent of
Themistocles, three Persian captive youths were
offered to Dionysus the Devour er.
As, then, some embodied their fears of winter
in Persephone, others embodied them in Dionysus,
a devouring god, whose sinister side (as the best
wine itself has its treacheries) is illustrated in the
dark and shameful secret society described by
Livy, in which his worship ended at Rome,
afterwards abolished by solemn act of the senate.
48
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
He becomes a new Aidoneus, a hunter of men's
souls ; like him, to be appeased only by costly
sacrifices.
And then, Dionysus recovering from his mid-
winter madness, how intensely these people con-
ceive the spring ! It is that triumphant Dionysus,
cured of his great malady, and sane in the clear
light of the longer days, whom Euripides in the
Bacchanals sets before us, as still, essentially, the
Hunter, Zagreus ; though he keeps the red
streams and torn flesh away from the delicate
body of the god, in his long vesture of white
and gold, and fragrant with Eastern odours. Of
this I hope to speak in another paper ; let me
conclude this by one phase more of religious
custom.
If Dionysus, like Persephone, has his gloomy
side, like her he has also a peculiar message for
a certain number of refined minds, seeking, in
the later days of Greek religion, such modifica-
tions of the old legend as may minister to ethical
culture, to the perfecting of the moral nature.
A type of second birth, from first to last, he
opens, in his series of annual changes, for minds
on the look-out for it, the hope of a possible
analogy, between the resurrection of nature, and
something else, as yet unrealised, reserved for
human souls ; and the beautiful, weeping creature,
vexed by the wind, suffering, torn to pieces, and
rejuvenescent again at last, like a tender shoot of
living green out of the hardness and stony dark-
E 49
GREEK STUDIES
ness of the earth, becomes an emblem or ideal
of chastening and purification, and of final victory
through suffering. It is the finer, mystical senti-
ment of the few, detached from the coarser and
more material religion of the many, and accom-
panying it, through the course of its history, as
its ethereal, less palpable, life-giving soul, and,
as always happens, seeking the quiet, and not too
anxious to make itself felt by others. With some
unfixed, though real, place in the general scheme
of Greek religion, this phase of the worship of
Dionysus had its special development in the
Orphic literature and mysteries. Obscure as are
those followers of the mystical Orpheus, we yet
certainly see them, moving, and playing their
part, in the later ages of Greek religion. Old
friends with new faces, though they had, as Plato
witnesses, their less worthy aspect, in certain
appeals to vulgar, superstitious fears, they seem
to have been not without the charm of a real
and inward religious beauty, with their neologies,
their new readings of old legends, their sense of
mystical second meanings, as they refined upon
themes grown too familiar, and linked, in a
sophisticated age, the new to the old. In this
respect, we may perhaps liken them to the
mendicant orders in the Middle Ages, with their
florid, romantic theology, beyond the bounds of
orthodox tradition, giving so much new matter
to art and poetry. They are a picturesque
addition, also, to the exterior of Greek life, with
SO
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
their white dresses, their dirges, their fastings
and ecstasies, their outward asceticism and material
purifications. And the central object of their
worship comes before us as a tortured, persecuted,
slain god — the suffering Dionysus — of whose
legend they have their own special and esoteric
version. That version, embodied in a supposed
Orphic poem, The Occultat'wn of Dionysus ^ is
represented only by the details that have passed
from it into the almost endless Dionysiaca of
Nonnus, a writer of the fourth century ; and the
imagery has to be put back into the shrine, bit
by bit, and finally incomplete. Its central point
is the picture of the rending to pieces of a divine
child, of whom a tradition, scanty indeed, but
harmonious in its variations, had long maintained
itself. It was in memory of it, that those who
were initiated into the Orphic mysteries tasted of
the raw flesh of the sacrifice, and thereafter ate
flesh no more ; and it connected itself with that
strange object in the Delphic shrine, the grave
of Dionysus.
Son, first, of Zeus, and of Persephone whom
Zeus woos, in the form of a serpent — the white,
golden-haired child, the best-beloved of his
father, and destined by him to be the ruler of
the world, grows up in secret. But one day,
Zeus, departing on a journey in his great fond-
ness for the child, delivered to him his crown
and staff, and so left him — shut in a strong tower.
Then it came to pass that the jealous Here sent
51
GREEK STUDIES
out the Titans against him. They approached
the crowned child, and with many sorts of play-
things enticed him away, to have him in their
power, and then miserably slew him — hacking
his body to pieces, as the wind tears the vine,
with the axe Pelekus, which, like the swords of
Roland and Arthur, has its proper name. The
fragments of the body they boiled in a great
cauldron, and made an impious banquet upon
them, afterwards carrying the bones to Apollo,
whose rival the young child should have been,
thinking to do him service. But Apollo, in
great pity for this his youngest brother, laid the
bones in a grave, within his own holy place.
Meanwhile, Here, full of her vengeance, brings
to Zeus the heart of the child, which she had
snatched, still beating, from the hands of the
Titans. But Zeus delivered the heart to Semele ;
and the soul of the child remaining awhile in
Hades, where Demeter made for it new flesh,
was thereafter born of Semele — a second Zagreus
— the younger, or Theban Dionysus.
52
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
So far, I have endeavoured to present, with some-
thing of the concrete character of a picture,
Dionysus, the old Greek god, as we may discern
him through a multitude of stray hints in art
and poetry and religious custom, through modern
speculation on the tendencies of early thought,
through traits and touches in our own actual
states of mind, which may seem sympathetic
with those tendencies. In such a picture there
must necessarily be a certain artificiality ; things
near and far, matter of varying degrees of certainty,
fact and surmise, being reflected and concentrated,
for its production, as if on the surface of a mirror.
Such concrete character, however, Greek poet or
sculptor, from time to time, impressed on the
vague world of popular belief and usage around
him ; and in the Bacchanals of Euripides we have
an example of the figurative or imaginative power
of poetry, selecting and combining, at will, from
that mixed and floating mass, weaving the many-
coloured threads together, blending the various
phases of legend — all the light and shade of the
53
GREEK STUDIES
subject — into a shape, substantial and firmly set,
through which a mere fluctuating tradition might
retain a permanent place in men's imaginations.
Here, in what Euripides really says, in what we
actually see on the stage, as we read his play,
we are dealing with a single real object, not with
uncertain effects of many half- fancied objects.
Let me leave you for a time almost wholly in
his hands, while you look very closely at his
work, so as to discriminate its outlines clearly.
This tragedy of the Bacchanals — a sort of
masque or morality, as we say — a monument as
central for the legend of Dionysus as the Homeric
hymn for that of Demeter, is unique in Greek
literature, and has also a singular interest in the
life of Euripides himself. He is writing in old
age (the piece was not played till after his death)
not at Athens, nor for a polished Attic audience,
but for a wilder and less temperately cultivated
sort of people, at the court of Archelaus, in
Macedonia. Writing in old age, he is in that
subdued mood, a mood not necessarily sordid, in
which (the shudder at the nearer approach of the
unknown world coming over him more fre-
quently than of old) accustomed ideas, conform-
able to a sort of common sense regarding the
unseen, oftentimes regain what they may have
lost, in a man's allegiance. It is a sort of
madness, he begins to think, to differ from the
received opinions thereon. Not that he is
insincere or ironical, but that he tends, in the
54
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
sum of probabilities, to dwell on their more
peaceful side ; to sit quiet, for the short remain-
ing time, in the reflexion of the more cheerfully
lighted side of things ; and what is accustomed
— what holds of familiar usage — comes to seem
the whole essence of wisdom, on all subjects ;
and the well-known delineation of the vague
country, in Homer or Hesiod, one's best attain-
able mental outfit, for the journey thither.
With this sort of quiet wisdom the whole play
is penetrated. Euripides has said, or seemed to
say, many things concerning Greek religion, at
variance with received opinion ; and now, in the
end of life, he desires to make his peace — what
shall at any rate be peace with men. He is in the
mood for acquiescence, or even for a palinode ;
and this takes the direction, partly of mere
submission to, partly of a refining upon, the
authorised religious tradition : he calmly sophisti-
cates this or that element of it which had
seemed grotesque ; and has, like any modern
writer, a theory how myths were made, and how
in lapse of time their first signification gets to be
obscured among mortals ; and what he submits
to, that he will also adorn fondly, by his genius
for words.
And that very neighbourhood afforded him
his opportunity. It was in the neighbourhood
of Pella, the Macedonian capital, that the
worship of Dionysus, the newest of the gods,
prevailed in its most extravagant form — the
55
GREEK STUDIES
Thtasus^ or wild, nocturnal procession of Bacchic
women, retired to the woods and hills for that
purpose, with its accompaniments of music, and
lights, and dancing. Rational and moderate
Athenians, as we may gather from some admis-
sions of Euripides himself, somewhat despised all
that ; while those who were more fanatical
forsook the home celebrations, and went on
pilgrimage from Attica to Cithaeron or Delphi.
But at Pella persons of high birth took part in
the exercise, and at a later period we read in
Plutarch how Olympias, the mother of Alexander
the Great, was devoted to this enthusiastic
worship. Although in one of Botticelli's pictures
the angels dance very sweetly, and may represent
many circumstances actually recorded in the
Hebrew scriptures, yet we hardly understand the
dance as a religious ceremony ; the bare mention
of it sets us thinking on some fundamental
differences between the pagan religions and our
own. It is to such ecstasies, however, that all
nature -worship seems to tend ; that giddy,
intoxicating sense of spring — that tingling in the
veins, sympathetic with the yearning life of the
earth, having, apparently, in all times and places,
prompted some mode of wild dancing. Coleridge,
in one of his fantastic speculations, refining on
the German word for enthusiasm — Schwdrmerei,
swarming, as he says, " like the swarming of bees
together " — has explained how the sympathies of
mere numbers, as such, the random catching on
56
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
fire of one here and another there, when people
are collected together, generates as if by mere
contact, some new and rapturous spirit, not
traceable in the individual units of a multitude.
Such swarming was the essence of that strange
dance of the Bacchic women : literally like
winged things, they follow, with motives, we
may suppose, never quite made clear even to
themselves, their new, strange, romantic god.
Himself a woman-like god, — it was on women
and feminine souls that his power mainly fell.
At Elis, it was the women who had their own
little song with which at spring-time they pro-
fessed to call him from the sea : at Brasias they
had their own temple where none but women
might enter ; and so the Thiasus^ also, is almost
exclusively formed of women — of those w^ho
experience most directly the influence of things
which touch thought through the senses — the
presence of night, the expectation of morning,
the nearness of wild, unsophisticated, natural
things — the echoes, the coolness, the noise of
frightened creatures as they climbed through the
darkness, the sunrise seen from the hill-tops, the
disillusion, the bitterness of satiety, the deep
slumber which comes with the morning.
Athenians visiting the Macedonian capital would
hear, and from time to time actually see, some-
thing of a religious custom, in which the habit
of an earlier world might seem to survive. As
they saw the lights flitting over the mountains,
57
GREEK STUDIES
and heard the wild, sharp cries of the women,
there was presented, as a singular fact in the
more prosaic actual life of a later time, an
enthusiasm otherwise relegated to the wonderland
of a distant past, in which a supposed primitive
harmony and understanding between man and
nature renewed itself. Later sisters of Centaur
and Amazon, the Maenads, as they beat the earth
in strange sympathy with its waking up from
sleep, or as, in the description of the Messenger,
in the play of Euripides, they lie sleeping in the
glen, revealed among the morning mists, were
themselves indeed as remnants — flecks left here
and there and not yet quite evaporated under the
hard light of a later and commoner day — of a
certain cloud-world which had once covered all
things with a veil of mystery. Whether or not,
in what was often probably coarse as well as
extravagant, there may have lurked some finer
vein of ethical symbolism, such as Euripides hints
at — the soberer influence, in the Thiasus, of keen
air and animal expansion, certainly, for art, and a
poetry delighting in colour and form, it was a
custom rich in suggestion. The imitative arts
would draw from it altogether new motives of
freedom and energy, of freshness in old forms.
It is from this fantastic scene that the beautiful
wind-touched draperies, the rhythm, the heads
suddenly thrown back, of many a Pompeian wall-
painting and sarcophagus -frieze are originally
derived ; and that melting languor, that perfectly
58
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
composed lassitude of the fallen Msnad, became
a fixed type in the school of grace, the school of
Praxiteles.
The circumstances of the place thus combining
with his peculiar motive, Euripides writes the
Bacchanals. It is this extravagant phase of
religion, and the latest-born of the gods, which
as an amende honorable to the once slighted tradi-
tions of Greek belief, he undertakes to interpret
to an audience composed of people who, like
Scyles, the Hellenising king of Scythia, feel the
attraction of Greek religion and Greek usage,
but on their quainter side, and partly relish that
extravagance. Subject and audience alike stimu-
late the romantic temper, and the tragedy of the
Bacchanals^ with its innovations in metre and
diction, expressly noted as foreign or barbarous —
all the charm and grace of the clear-pitched
singing of the chorus, notwithstanding — with
its subtleties and sophistications, its grotesques,
mingled with and heightening a real shudder at
the horror of the theme, and a peculiarly fine
and human pathos, is almost wholly without the
reassuring calm, generally characteristic of the
endings of Greek tragedy : is itself excited,
troubled, disturbing — a spotted or dappled thing,
like the oddly dappled fawn -skins of its own
masquerade, so aptly expressive of the shifty,
twofold, rapidly-doubling genius of the divine,
wild creature himself. Let us listen and watch
the strange masks coming and going, for a while,
59
GREEK STUDIES
as far as may be as we should do with a modern
play. What are its charms ? What is still alive,
impressive, and really poetical for us, in the dim
old Greek play ?
The scene is laid at Thebes, where the
memory of Semele, the mother of Dionysus, is
still under a cloud. Her own sisters, sinning
against natural affection, pitiless over her pathetic
death and finding in it only a judgment upon the
impiety with which, having shamed herself with
some mortal lover, she had thrown the blame of
her sin upon Zeus, have, so far, triumphed over
her. The true and glorious version of her story
lives only in the subdued memory of the two
aged men, Teiresias the prophet, and her father
Cadmus, apt now to let things go loosely by,
who has delegated his royal power to Pentheus,
the son of one of those sisters — a hot-headed
and impious youth. So things had passed at
Thebes ; and now a strange circumstance has
happened. An odd sickness has fallen upon the
women : Dionysus has sent the sting of his
enthusiasm upon them, and has pushed it to a
sort of madness, a madness which imitates the
true Thiasus, Forced to have the form without
the profit of his worship, the whole female
population, leaving distaff and spindle, and headed
by the three princesses, have deserted the town,
and are lying encamped on the bare rocks, or
under the pines, among the solitudes of Cithasron.
And it is just at this point that the divine child,
60
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
supposed to have perished at his mother's side in
the flames, returns to his birthplace, grown to
manhood.
Dionysus himself speaks the prologue. He
is on a journey through the world to found a
new religion ; and the first motive of this new
religion is the vindication of the memory of his
mother. In explaining this design, Euripides,
who seeks always for pathetic effect, tells in few
words, touching because simple, the story of
Semele — here, and again still more intensely in
the chorus which follows — the merely human
sentiment of maternity being not forgotten, even
amid the thought of the divine embraces of her
fiery bed-fellow. It is out of tenderness for her
that the son's divinity is to be revealed. A
yearning affection, the affection with which we
see him lifting up his arms about her, satisfied
at last, on an old Etruscan metal mirror, has led
him from place to place : everywhere he has
had his dances and established his worship ; and
everywhere his presence has been her justifica-
tion. First of all the towns in Greece he comes
to Thebes, the scene of her sorrows : he is
standing beside the sacred waters of Dirce and
Ismenus : the holy place is in sight : he hears
the Greek speech, and sees at last the ruins of
the place of her lying-in, at once his own birth-
chamber and his mother's tomb. His image, as
it detaches itself little by little from the episodes
of the play, and is further characterised by the
6i
GREEK STUDIES
songs of the chorus, has a singular completeness
of symbolical effect. The incidents of a fully
developed human personality are superinduced
on the mystical and abstract essence of that
fiery spirit in the flowing veins of the earth —
the aroma of the green w^orld is retained in the
fair human body, set forth in all sorts of finer
ethical lights and shades — with a wonderful kind
of subtlety. In the course of his long progress
from land to land, the gold, the flowers, the
incense of the East, have attached themselves
deeply to him : their effect and expression rest
now upon his flesh like the gleaming of that old
ambrosial ointment of which Homer speaks as
resting ever on the persons of the gods, and
cling to his clothing — the mitre binding his
perfumed yellow hair — the long tunic down to
the white feet, somewhat womanly, and the
fawn -skin, with its rich spots, wrapped about
the shoulders. As the door opens to admit
him, the scented air of the vineyards (for the
vine-blossom has an exquisite perfume) blows
through ; while the convolvulus on his mystic
rod represents all wreathing flowery things what-
ever, with or without fruit, as in America all
such plants are still called vines, " Sweet upon
the mountains," the excitement of which he loves
so deeply and to which he constantly invites his
followers — "sweet upon the mountains," and
profoundly amorous, his presence embodies all
the voluptuous abundance of Asia, its beating
62
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
sun, its " fair-towered cities, full of inhabitants,"
which the chorus describe in their luscious
vocabulary, with the rich Eastern names — Lydia,
Persia, Arabia Felix : he is a sorcerer or an en-
chanter, the tyrant Pentheus thinks : the springs
of water, the flowing of honey and milk and
wine, are his miracles, wrought in person.
We shall see presently how, writing for that
northern audience, Euripides crosses the Theban
with the gloomier Thracian legend, and lets the
darker stain show through. Yet, from the first,
amid all this floweriness, a touch or trace of that
gloom is discernible. The fawn-skin, composed
now so daintily over the shoulders, may be worn
with the whole coat of the animal made up, the
hoofs gilded and tied together over the right
shoulder, to leave the right arm disengaged to
strike, its head clothing the human head within,
as Alexander, on some of his coins, looks out
from the elephant's scalp, and Hercules out of
the jaws of a lion, on the coins of Camarina.
Those diminutive golden horns attached to the
forehead, represent not fecundity merely, nor
merely the crisp tossing of the waves of streams,
but horns of offence. And our fingers must be-
ware of the thyrsus^ tossed about so wantonly by
himself and his chorus. The pine-cone at its top
does but cover a spear-point ; and the thing is a
weapon — the sharp spear of the hunter Zagreus
— though hidden now by the fresh leaves, and
that button of pine-cone (useful also to dip in
63
GREEK STUDIES
wine, to check the sweetness) which he has
plucked down, coming through the forest, at
peace for a while this spring morning.
And the chorus emphasise this character,
their songs weaving for the whole piece, in
words more effective than any painted scenery,
a certain congruous background which heightens
all ; the intimate sense of mountains and moun-
tain things being in this way maintained
throughout, and concentrated on the central
figure. "He is sweet among the mountains,"
they say, " when he drops down upon the plain,
out of his mystic musings" — and we may think
we see the green festoons of the vine dropping
quickly, from foot-place to foot-place, down the
broken hill-side in spring, when like the Bac-
chanals, all who can, wander out of the town to
enjoy the earliest heats. " Let us go out into
the fields," we say ; a strange madness seems to
lurk among the flowers, ready to lay hold on
us also ; avrUa r^a irda-a xopev<ret SOOn the whole
earth will dance and sing.
Dionysus is especially a woman's deity, and
he comes from the east conducted by a chorus
of gracious Lydian women, his true sisters —
Bassarids, clad like himself in the long tunic,
or bassara. They move and speak to the music
of clangorous metallic instruments, cymbals and
tambourines, relieved by the clearer notes of the
pipe ; and there is a strange variety of almost
imitative sounds for such music, in their very
64
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
words. The Homeric hymn to Demeter pre-
cedes the art of sculpture, but is rich in sugges-
tions for it ; here, on the contrary, in the first
chorus of the Bacchanals, as elsewhere in the
play, we feel that the poetry of Euripides is
probably borrowing something from art ; that
in these choruses, with their repetitions and
refrains, he is reproducing perhaps the spirit of
some sculptured relief which, like Luca della
Robbia's celebrated work for the organ-loft of
the cathedral of Florence, worked by various
subtleties of line, not in the lips and eyes only,
but in the drapery and hands also, to a strange
reality of impression of musical effect on visible
things.
They beat their drums before the palace ;
and then a humourous little scene, a reflex of
the old Dionysiac comedy — of that laughter
which was an essential element of the earliest
worship of Dionysus — follows the first chorus.
The old blind prophet Teiresias, and the aged
king Cadmus, always secretly true to him, have
agreed to celebrate the Thiasus, and accept his
divinity openly. The youthful god has no-
where said decisively that he will have none
but young men in his sacred dance. But for
that purpose they must put on the long tunic,
and that spotted skin which only rustics wear,
and assume the thyrsus and ivy-crown. Teiresias
arrives and is seen knocking at the doors. And
then, just as in the medieval mystery, comes the
F 65
GREEK STUDIES
inevitable grotesque, not unwelcome to our poet,
who is wont in his plays, perhaps not altogether
consciously, to intensify by its relief both the
pity and the terror of his conceptions. At the
summons of Teiresias, Cadmus appears, already
arrayed like him in the appointed ornaments,
in all their odd contrast with the infirmity and
staidness of old age. Even in old men's veins
the spring leaps again, and they are more than
ready to begin dancing. But they are shy of
the untried dress, and one of them is blind — m-ot
tei "XppeveLv ; ttoI KaOca-rdvat "rroSa ; koX Kpara aeia-ai
ttoXlov ; and then the difficulty of the way ! the
long, steep journey to the glens ! may pilgrims
boil their peas ? might they proceed to the place
in carriages ? At last, while the audience laugh
more or less delicately at their aged fumblings,
in some co-operative manner, the eyes of the
one combining with the hands of the other,
the pair are about to set forth.
Here Pentheus is seen approaching the palace
in extreme haste. He has been absent from
home, and returning, has just heard of the state
of things at Thebes — the strange malady of the
women, the dancings, the arrival of the mysteri-
ous stranger : he finds all the women departed
from the town, and sees Cadmus and Teiresias in
masque. Like the exaggerated diabolical figures
in some of the religious plays and imageries of
the Middle Age, he is an impersonation of stupid
impiety, one of those whom the gods willing to
66
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
destroy first infatuate. Alternating between glib
unwisdom and coarse mockery, between violence
and a pretence of moral austerity, he understands
only the sorriest motives ; thinks the whole thing
feigned, and fancies the stranger, so effeminate, so
attractive of women with whom he remains day
and night, but a poor sensual creature, and the
real motive of the Bacchic women the indulg-
ence of their lust ; his ridiculous old grandfather
he is ready to renounce, and accuses Teiresias of
having in view only some fresh source of pro-
fessional profit to himself in connexion with some
new-fangled oracle ; his petty spite avenges itself
on the prophet by an order to root up the sacred
chair, where he sits to watch the birds for
divination, and disturb the order of his sacred
place ; and even from the moment of his en-
trance the mark of his doom seems already set
upon him, in an impotent trembling which
others notice in him. Those of the women
who still loitered, he has already caused to be
shut up in the common prison ; the others, with
Ino, Autonoe, and his own mother. Agave, he
will hunt out of the glens ; while the stranger
is threatened with various cruel forms of death.
But Teiresias and Cadmus stay to reason with
him, and induce him to abide wisely with them ;
the prophet fittingly becomes the interpreter of
Dionysus, and explains the true nature of the
visitor ; his divinity, the completion or counter-
part of that of Demeter ; his gift of prophecy ;
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GREEK STUDIES
all the soothing influences he brings with him ;
above all, his gift of the medicine of sleep to
weary mortals. But the reason of Pentheus is
already sickening, and the judicial madness
gathering over it. Teiresias and Cadmus can
but " go pray." So again, not without the
laughter of the audience, supporting each other
a little grotesquely against a fall, they get away
at last.
And then, again, as in those quaintly carved
and coloured imageries of the Middle Age — the
martyrdom of the youthful Saint Firmin, for
instance, round the choir at Amiens — comes the
full contrast, with a quite medieval simplicity
and directness, between the insolence of the
tyrant, now at last in sight of his prey, and the
outraged beauty of the youthful god, meek,
surrounded by his enemies, like some fair wild
creature in the snare of the hunter. Dionysus
has been taken prisoner ; he is led on to the
stage, with his hands bound, but still holding
the thyrsus. Unresisting he had submitted him-
self to his captors ; his colour had not changed ;
with a smile he had bidden them do their will,
so that even they are touched with awe, and are
almost ready to admit his divinity. Marvel-
lously white and red, he stands there ; and now,
unwilling to be revealed to the unworthy, and
requiring a fitness in the receiver, he represents
himself, in answer to the inquiries of Pentheus,
not as Dionysus, but simply as the god's prophet,
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THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
in full trust in whom he desires to hear his
sentence. Then the long hair falls to the ground
under the shears ; the mystic wand is torn from
his hand, and he is led away to be tied up, like
some dangerous wild animal, in a dark place
near the king's stables.
Up to this point in the play, there has been
a noticeable ambiguity as to the person of
Dionysus, the main figure of the piece ; he is in
part Dionysus, indeed ; but in part, only his
messenger, or minister preparing his way ; a
certain harshness of effect in the actual appear-
ance of a god upon the stage being in this way
relieved, or made easy, as by a gradual revelation
in two steps. To Pentheus, in his invincible
ignorance, his essence remains to the last un-
revealed, and even the women of the chorus
seem to understand in him, so far, only the
forerunner of their real leader. As he goes away
bound, therefore, they too, threatened also in
their turn with slavery, invoke his greater
original to appear and deliver them. In pathetic
cries they reproach Thebes for rejecting them —
Ti fi dvatvei, rl fie (f)€v<y€i<i ; yet they foretell his
future greatness ; a new Orpheus, he will more
than renew that old miraculous reign over
animals and plants. Their song is full of
suggestions of wood and river. It is as if, for a
moment, Dionysus became the suffering vine
again ; and the rustle of the leaves and water
come through their words to refresh it. The
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GREEK STUDIES
fountain of Dirce still haunted by the virgins of
Thebes, where the infant god was cooled and
washed from the flecks of his fiery birth, becomes
typical of the coolness of all springs, and is made,
by a really poetic licence, the daughter of the
distant Achelous — the earliest born, the father in
myth, of all Greek rivers.
A giddy sonorous scene of portents and
surprises follows — a distant, exaggerated, dramatic
reflex of that old thundering tumult of the festival
in the vineyard — in which Dionysus reappears,
miraculously set free from his bonds. First, in
answer to the deep-toned invocation of the chorus,
a great voice is heard from within, proclaiming
him to be the son of Semele and Zeus. Then,
amid the short, broken, rapturous cries of the
women of the chorus, proclaiming him master,
the noise of an earthquake passes slowly ; the
pillars of the palace are seen waving to and fro ;
while the strange, memorial fire from the tomb
of Semele blazes up and envelopes the whole
building. The terrified women fling themselves
on the ground ; and then, at last, as the place is
shaken open, Dionysus is seen stepping out from
among the tottering masses of the mimic palace,
bidding them arise and fear not. But just here
comes a long pause in the action of the play, in
which we must listen to a messenger newly
arrived from the glens, to tell us what he has
seen there, among the Maenads. The singular,
somewhat sinister beauty of this speech, and a
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THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
similar one subsequent — a fair description of
morning on the mountain-tops, with the Bacchic
women sleeping, which turns suddenly to a hard,
coarse picture of animals cruelly rent — is one of
the special curiosities which distinguish this play ;
and, as it is wholly narrative, I shall give it in
English prose, abbreviating, here and there,
some details which seem to have but a metrical
value : —
" I was driving my herd of cattle to the
summit of the scaur to feed, what time the sun
sent forth his earliest beams to warm the earth.
And lo ! three companies of women, and at the
head of one of them Autonoe, thy mother Agave
at the head of the second, and Ino at the head of
the third. And they all slept, with limbs re-
laxed, leaned against the low boughs of the pines,
or with head thrown heedlessly among the oak-
leaves strewn upon the ground — all in the sleep
of temperance, not, as thou saidst, pursuing
Cypris through the solitudes of the forest,
drunken with wine, amid the low rustling of
the lotus-pipe.
" And thy mother, when she-heard the lowing
of the kine, stood up in the midst of them, and
cried to them to shake off sleep. And they,
casting slumber from their eyes, started upright,
a marvel of beauty and order, young and old
and maidens yet unmarried. And first, they let
fall their hair upon their shoulders ; and those
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GREEK STUDIES
whose cinctures were unbound re-composed the
spotted fawn-skins, knotting them about with
snakes, which rose and licked them on the chin.
Some, lately mothers, who with breasts still
swelling had left their babes behind, nursed in
their arms antelopes, or wild whelps of wolves,
and yielded them their milk to drink ; and upon
their heads they placed crowns of ivy or of oak,
or of flowering convolvulus. Then one, taking
a thyrsus-wand, struck with it upon a rock, and
thereupon leapt out a fine rain of water ; another
let down a reed upon the earth, and a fount of
wine was sent forth there ; and those whose
thirst was for a white stream, skimming the
surface with their finger-tips, gathered from it
abundance of milk ; and from the ivy of the
mystic wands streams of honey distilled. Verily !
hadst thou seen these things, thou wouldst have
worshipped whom now thou revilest.
" And we shepherds and herdsmen came
together to question with each other over this
matter — what strange and terrible things they
do. And a certain wayfarer from the city,
subtle in speech, spake to us — ' O ! dwellers
upon these solemn ledges of the hills, will ye
that we hunt down, and take, amid her revelries.
Agave, the mother of Pentheus, according to
the king's pleasure ? ' And he seemed to us to
speak wisely ; and we lay in wait among the
bushes ; and they, at the time appointed, began
moving their wands for the Bacchic dance,
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THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
calling with one voice upon Bromius ! — lacchus !
— the son of Zeus ! and the whole mountain
was moved with ecstasy together, and the wild
creatures ; nothing but was moved in their
running. And it chanced that Agave, in her
leaping, lighted near me, and I sprang from my
hiding-place, willing to lay hold on her ; and
she groaned out, * O ! dogs of hunting, these
fellows are upon our traces ; but follow me !
follow ! with the mystic wands for weapons in
your hands.* And we, by flight, hardly escaped
tearing to pieces at their hands, who thereupon
advanced with knifeless fingers upon the young
of the kine, as they nipped the green ; and then
hadst thou seen one holding a bleating calf in
her hands, with udder distent, straining it
asunder ; others tore the heifers to shreds
amongst them ; tossed up and down the morsels
lay in sight — flank or hoof — or hung from the
fir-trees, dropping churned blood. The fierce,
horned bulls stumbled forward, their breasts
upon the ground, dragged on by myriad hands
of young women, and in a moment the inner
parts were rent to morsels. So, like a flock of
birds aloft in flight, they retreat upon the level
lands outstretched below, which by the waters of
Asopus put forth the fair -flowering crop of
Theban people — Hysias and Erythras — below the
precipice of Cithaeron." —
A grotesque scene follows, in which the
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GREEK STUDIES
humour we noted, on seeing those two old men
diffidently set forth in chaplet and fawn -skin,
deepens into a profound tragic irony. Pentheus
is determined to go out in arms against the
Bacchanals and put them to death, when a sudden
desire seizes him to witness them in their en-
campment upon the mountains. Dionysus,
whom he still supposes to be but a prophet or
messenger of the god, engages to conduct him
thither ; and, for greater security among the
dangerous women, proposes that he shall disguise
himself in female attire. As Pentheus goes
within for that purpose, he lingers for a moment
behind him, and in prophetic speech declares
the approaching end ; — the victim has fallen
into the net ; and he goes in to assist at the
toilet, to array him in the ornaments which he
will carry to Hades, destroyed by his own
mother's hands. It is characteristic of Euripides
— part of his fine tact and subtlety — to relieve
and justify what seems tedious, or constrained,
or merely terrible and grotesque, by a suddenly
suggested trait of homely pathos, or a glimpse
of natural beauty, or a morsel of form or colour
seemingly taken directly from picture or
sculpture. So here, in this fantastic scene our
thoughts are changed in a moment by the sing-
ing of the chorus, and divert for a while to the
dark-haired tresses of the wood ; the breath of
the river-side is upon us ; beside it, a fawn
escaped from the hunter's net is flying swiftly in
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THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
its joy ; like it, the Msenad rushes along ; and
we see the little head thrown back upon the
neck, in deep aspiration, to drink in the dew.
Meantime, Pentheus has assumed his disguise,
and comes forth tricked up with false hair and
the dress of a Bacchanal ; but still with some
misgivings at the thought of going thus attired
through the streets of Thebes, and with many-
laughable readjustments of the unwonted articles
of clothing. And with the woman's dress, his
madness is closing faster round him ; just before,
in the palace, terrified at the noise of the earth-
quake, he had drawn sword upon a mere fantastic
appearance, and pierced only the empty air.
Now he begins to see the sun double, and
Thebes with all its towers repeated, while his
conductor seems to him transformed into a wild
beast ; and now and then, we come upon some
touches of a curious psychology, so that we
might almost seem to be reading a modern poet.
As if Euripides had been aware of a not unknown
symptom of incipient madness (it is said) in
which the patient, losing the sense of resistance,
while lifting small objects imagines himself to
be raising enormous weights, Pentheus, as he
lifts the thyrsus^ fancies he could lift Cithseron
with all the Bacchanals upon it. At all this
the laughter of course will pass round the
theatre ; while those who really pierce into the
purpose of the poet, shudder, as they see the
victim thus grotesquely clad going to his doom,
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GREEK STUDIES
already foreseen in the ominous chant of the
chorus — and as it were his grave-clothes, in the
dress which makes him ridiculous.
Presently a messenger arrives to announce
that Pentheus is dead, and then another curious
narrative sets forth the manner of his death.
Full of wild, coarse, revolting details, of course
not without pathetic touches, and with the
loveliness of the serving Masnads, and of their
mountain solitudes- -their trees and water — never
quite forgotten, it describes how, venturing as a
spy too near the sacred circle, Pentheus was
fallen upon, like a wild beast, by the mystic
huntresses and torn to pieces, his mother being
the first to begin " the sacred rites of slaughter."
And at last Agave herself comes upon the
stage, holding aloft the head of her son, fixed
upon the sharp end of the thyrsus^ calling upon
the women of the chorus to welcome the revel
of the Evian god ; who, accordingly, admit her
into the company, professing themselves her
fellow-revellers, the Bacchanals being thus ab-
sorbed into the chorus for the rest of the play.
For, indeed, all through it, the true, though
partly suppressed relation of the chorus to the
Bacchanals is this, that the women of the chorus,
staid and temperate for the moment, following
Dionysus in his alternations, are but the paler
sisters of his more wild and gloomy votaries —
the true followers of the mystical Dionysus —
the real chorus of Zagreus ; the idea that their
76
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
violent proceedings are the result of madness only,
sent on them as a punishment for their original
rejection of the god, being, as I said, when seen
from the deeper motives of the myth, only a
" sophism " of Euripides — a piece of rationalism
of which he avails himself for the purpose of
softening down the tradition of which he has
undertaken to be the poet. Agave comes on
the stage, then, blood-stained, exulting in her
" victory of tears," still quite visibly mad indeed,
and with the outward signs of madness, and as
her mind wanders, musing still on the fancy
that the dead head in her hands is that of a lion
she has slain among the mountains — a young
lion, she avers, as she notices the down on the
young man's chin, and his abundant hair — a
fancy in which the chorus humour her, willing
to deal gently with the poor distraught creature.
Supported by them, she rejoices " exceedingly,
exceedingly," declaring herself " fortunate " in
such goodly spoil ; priding herself that the
victim has been slain, not with iron weapons,
but with her own white fingers, she summons
all Thebes to come and behold. She calls for
her aged father to draw near and see ; and for
Pentheus himself, at last, that he may mount
and rivet her trophy, appropriately decorative
there, between the triglyphs of the cornice below
the roof, visible to all.
And now, from this point onwards, Dionysus
himself becomes more and more clearly discern-
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ible as the hunter, a wily hunter, and man the
prey he hunts for ; " Our king is a hunter,"
cry the chorus, as they unite in Agave's triumph
and give their sanction to her deed. And as the
Bacchanals supplement the chorus, and must be
added to it to make the conception of it complete ;
so in the conception of Dionysus also a certain
transference, or substitution, must be made —
much of the horror and sorrow of Agave, of
Pentheus, of the whole tragic situation, must be
transferred to him, if we wish to realise in the
older, profounder, and more complete sense of
his nature, that mystical being of Greek tradition
to whom all these experiences — his madness, the
chase, his imprisonment and death, his peace
again — really belong ; and to discern which,
through Euripides' peculiar treatment of his
subject, is part of the curious interest of this
play.
Through the sophism of Euripides ! For that,
again, is the really descriptive word, with which
Euripides, a lover of sophisms, as Aristophanes
knows, himself supplies us. Well ; — this softened
version of the Bacchic madness is a sophism of
Euripides ; and Dionysus Omophagus — the eater
of raw flesh, must be added to the golden image
of Dionysus Meilichius — the honey-sweet, if the
old tradition in its completeness is to be, in spite
of that sophism, our closing impression ; if we
are to catch, in its fulness, that deep under-
current of horror which runs below, all through
;8
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
this masque of spring, and realise the spectacle
of that wild chase, in which Dionysus is ulti-
mately both the hunter and the spoil.
But meantime another person appears on the
stage ; Cadmus enters, followed by attendants
bearing on a bier the torn limbs of Pentheus,
which lying wildly scattered through the tangled
wood, have been with difficulty collected and
now decently put together and covered over.
In the little that still remains before the end of
the play, destiny now hurrying things rapidly
forward, and strong emotions, hopes and fore-
bodings being now closely packed, Euripides has
before him an artistic problem of enormous
difficulty. Perhaps this very haste and close-
packing of the matter, which keeps the mind
from dwelling overmuch on detail, relieves its
real extravagance, and those who read it care-
fully will think that the pathos of Euripides has
been equal to the occasion. In a few profoundly
designed touches he depicts the perplexity of
Cadmus, in whose house a god had become an
inmate, only to destroy it — the regret of the old
man for the one male child to whom that house
had looked up as the pillar whereby aged people
might feel secure; the piteous craziness of Agave;
the unconscious irony with which she caresses
the florid, youthful head of her son ; the delicate
breaking of the thing to her reviving intelligence,
as Cadmus, though he can but wish that she
might live on for ever in her visionary enjoy-
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ment, prepares the way, by playing on that other
horrible legend of the Theban house, the tearing
of Actaeon to death — he too destroyed by a god.
He gives us the sense of Agave's gradual return
to reason through many glimmering doubts, till
she wakes up at last to find the real face turned
up towards the mother and murderess ; the quite
naturally spontaneous sorrow of the mother, end-
ing with her confession, down to her last sigh,
and the final breaking up of the house of Cadmus ;
with a result so genuine, heartfelt, and dignified
withal in its expression of a strange ineffable
woe, that a fragment of it, the lamentation of
Agave over her son, in which the long -pent
agony at last finds vent, were, it is supposed,
adopted into his paler work by an early Christian
poet, and have figured since, as touches of real
fire, in the Christus Fattens of Gregory Nazianzen,
80
THE MYTH OF
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
No chapter in the history of human imagination
is more curious that the myth of Demeter, and
Kore or Persephone. Alien in some respects
from the genuine traditions of Greek mythology,
a relic of the earlier inhabitants of Greece, and
having but a subordinate place in the religion
of Homer, it yet asserted its interest, little by
little, and took a complex hold on the minds
of the Greeks, becoming finally the central and
most popular subject of their national worship.
Following its changes, we come across various
phases of Greek culture, which are not without
their likenesses in the modern mind. We trace
it in the dim first period of instinctive popular
conception ; we see it connecting itself with
many impressive elements of art, and poetry, and
religious custom, with the picturesque supersti-
tions of the many, and with the finer intuitions
of the few ; and besides this, it is in itself full of
G 8i
GREEK STUDIES
interest and suggestion, to all for whom the
ideas of the Greek religion have any real
meaning in the modern world. And the fortune
of the myth has not deserted it in later times.
In the year 1780, the long-lost text of the
Homeric Hymn to Demeter was discovered
among the manuscripts of the imperial library
at Moscow ; and, in our own generation, the
tact of an eminent student of Greek art. Sir
Charles Newton, has restored to the world the
buried treasures of the little temple and precinct
of Demeter, at Cnidus, which have many claims
to rank in the central order of Greek sculpture.
The present essay is an attempt to select and
weave together, for those who are now approach-
ing the deeper study of Greek thought, whatever
details in the development of this myth, arranged
with a view rather to a total impression than to
the debate of particular points, may seem likely
to increase their stock of poetical impressions,
and to add to this some criticisms on the expres-
sion which it has left of itself in extant art and
poetry.
The central expression, then, of the story of
Demeter and Persephone is the Homeric hymn,
to which Grote has assigned a date at least as
early as six hundred years before Christ. The
one survivor of a whole family of hymns on this
subject, it was written, perhaps, for one of those
contests which took place on the seventh day of
the Eleusinian festival, and in which a bunch of
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DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
ears of corn was the prize ; perhaps, for actual
use in the mysteries themselves, by the Hiero-
phantesy or Interpreter, who showed to the
worshippers at Eleusis those sacred places to
which the poem contains so many references.
About the composition itself there are many
difficult questions, with various surmises as to
why it has remained only in this unique manu-
script of the end of the fourteenth century.
Portions of the text are missing, and there are
probably some additions by later hands ; yet
most scholars have admitted that it possesses
some of the true characteristics of the Homeric
style, some genuine echoes of the age immedi-
ately succeeding that which produced the Iliad
and the Odyssey. Listen now to a somewhat
abbreviated version of it.
" I begin the song of Demeter " — says the
prize-poet, or the Interpreter, the Sacristan of
the holy places — " the song of Demeter and her
daughter Persephone, whom Aidoneus carried
away by the consent of Zeus, as she played,
apart from her mother, with the deep-bosomed
daughters of the Ocean, gathering flowers in a
meadow of soft grass — roses and the crocus and
fair violets and flags, and hyacinths, and, above
all, the strange flower of the narcissus, which
the Earth, favouring the desire of Aidoneus,
brought forth for the first time, to snare the
footsteps of the flower-like girl. A hundred
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GREEK STUDIES
heads of blossom grew up from the roots of it,
and the sky and the earth and the salt wave of
the sea were glad at the scent thereof. She
stretched forth her hands to take the flower ;
thereupon the earth opened, and the king of the
great nation of the dead sprang out with his
immortal horses. He seized the unwilling girl,
and bore her away weeping, on his golden
chariot. She uttered a shrill cry, calling upon
her father Zeus ; but neither man nor god heard
her voice, nor even the nymphs of the meadow
where she played ; except Hecate only, the
daughter of Persaeus, sitting, as ever, in her cave,
half veiled with a shining veil, thinking delicate
thoughts ; she, and the Sun also, heard her.
" So long as she could still see the earth, and
the sky, and the sea with the great waves moving,
and the beams of the sun, and still thought to
see again her mother, and the race of the ever-
living gods, so long hope soothed her, in the
midst of her grief. The peaks of the hills and
the depths of the sea echoed her cry. And the
mother heard it. A sharp pain seized her at the
heart ; she plucked the veil from her hair, and
cast down the blue hood from her shoulders, and
fled forth like a bird, seeking Persephone over
dry land and sea. But neither man nor god
would tell her the truth ; nor did any bird come
to her as a sure messenger.
" Nine days she wandered up and down upon
the earth, having blazing torches in her hands ;
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DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
and, in her great sorrow, she refused to taste of
ambrosia, or of the cup of the sweet nectar, nor
washed her face. But when the tenth morning
came, Hecate met her, having a light in her
hands. But Hecate had heard the voice only,
and had seen no one, and could not tell Demeter
who had borne the girl away. And Demeter
said not a word, but fled away swiftly with her,
having the blazing torches in her hands, till they
came to the Sun, the watchman both of gods
and men ; and the goddess questioned him, and
the Sun told her the whole story.
" Then a more terrible grief took possession
of Demeter, and, in her anger against Zeus, she
forsook the assembly of the gods and abode
among men, for a long time veiling her beauty
under a worn countenance, so that none who
looked upon her knew her, until she came to the
house of Celeus, who was then king of Eleusis.
In her sorrow, she sat down at the wayside by
the virgin's well, where the people of Eleusis
come to draw water, under the shadow of an
olive-tree. She seemed as an aged woman whose
time of child-bearing is gone by, and from
whom the gifts of Aphrodite have been with-
drawn, like one of the hired servants, who nurse
the children or keep house, in kings' palaces.
And the daughters of Celeus, four of them, like
goddesses, possessing the flower of their youth,
Callidice, Cleisidice, Demo, and Callithoe the
eldest of them, coming to draw water that they
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might bear it in their brazen pitchers to their
father's house, saw Demeter and knew her not.
The gods are hard for men to recognise.
" They asked her kindly what she did there,
alone ; and Demeter answered, dissemblingly,
that she was escaped from certain pirates, who
had carried her from her home and meant to
sell her as a slave. Then they prayed her to
abide there while they returned to the palace,
to ask their mother's permission to bring her
home.
" Demeter bowed her head in assent ; and
they, having filled their shining vessels with
water, bore them away, rejoicing in their beauty.
They came quickly to their father's house, and
told their mother what they had seen and heard.
Their mother bade them return, and hire the
woman for a great price ; and they, like the
hinds or young heifers leaping in the fields in
spring, fulfilled with the pasture, holding up the
folds of their raiment, sped along the hollow
road-way, their hair, in colour like the crocus,
floating about their shoulders as they went.
They found the glorious goddess still sitting by
the wayside, unmoved. Then they led her to
their father's house ; and she, veiled from head
to foot, in her deep grief, followed them on the
way, and her blue robe gathered itself as she
walked, in many folds about her feet. They
came to the house, and passed through the
sunny porch, where their mother, Metaneira, was
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DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
sitting against one of the pillars of the roof,
having a young child in her bosom. They ran
up to her ; but Demeter crossed the threshold,
and, as she passed through, her head rose and
touched the roof, and her presence filled the
doorway with a divine brightness.
" Still they did not wholly recognise her.
After a time she was made to smile. She refused
to drink wine, but tasted of a cup mingled of
water and barley, flavoured with mint. It
happened that Metaneira had lately borne a
child. It had come beyond hope, long after its
elder brethren, and was the object of a pecu-
liar tenderness and of many prayers with all.
Demeter consented to remain, and become the
nurse of this child. She took the child in her
immortal hands, and placed it in her fragrant
bosom ; and the heart of the mother rejoiced.
Thus Demeter nursed Demophoon. And the
child grew like a god, neither sucking the breast,
nor eating bread ; but Demeter daily anointed
it with ambrosia, as if it had indeed been the
child of a god, breathing sweetly over it and
holding it in her bosom ; and at nights, when
she lay alone with the child, she would hide it
secretly in the red strength of the fire, like a
brand ; for her heart yearned towards it, and she
would fain have given to it immortal youth.
" But the foolishness of his mother prevented
it. For a suspicion growing up within her, she
awaited her time, and one night peeped in upon
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them, and thereupon cried out in terror at what
she saw. And the goddess heard her ; and a
sudden anger seizing her, she plucked the child
from the fire and cast it on the ground, — the
child she would fain have made immortal, but
who must now share the common destiny of all
men, though some inscrutable grace should still
be his, because he had lain for awhile on the
knees and in the bosom of the goddess.
"Then Demetcr manifested herself openly.
She put away the mask of old age, and changed
her form, and the spirit of beauty breathed about
her. A fragrant odour fell from her raiment,
and her flesh shone from afar ; the long yellow
hair descended waving over her shoulders, and
the great house was filled as with the brightness
of lightning. She passed out through the halls ;
and Metaneira fell to the earth, and was speech-
less for a long time, and remembered not to lift
the child from the ground. But the sisters,
hearing its piteous cries, leapt from their beds
and ran to it. Then one of them lifted the child
from the earth, and wrapped it in her bosom,
and another hastened to her mother's chamber to
awake her : they came round the child, and
washed away the flecks of the fire from its pant-
ing body, and kissed it tenderly all about : but
the anguish of the child ceased not ; the arms
of other and different nurses were about to
enfold it.
" So, all night, trembling with fear, they
88
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
sought to propitiate the glorious goddess ; and
in the morning they told all to their father,
Celeus. And he, according to the commands
of the goddess, built a fair temple ; and all the
people assisted ; and when it was finished every
man departed to his own home. Then Demeter
returned, and sat down within the temple-walls,
and remained still apart from the company of
the gods, alone in her wasting regret for her
daughter Persephone.
" And, in her anger, she sent upon the earth
a year of grievous famine. The dry seed re-
mained hidden in the soil ; in vain the oxen
drew the ploughshare through the furrows ;
much white seed-corn fell fruitless on the earth,
and the whole human race had like to have
perished, and the gods had no more service of
men, unless Zeus had interfered. First he sent
Iris, afterwards all the gods, one by one, to turn
Demeter from her anger ; but none was able to
persuade her ; she heard their words with a hard
countenance, and vowed by no means to return
to Olympus, nor to yield the fruit of the earth,
until her eyes had seen her lost daughter again.
Then, last of all, Zeus sent Hermes into the
kingdom of the dead, to persuade Aidoneus to
suffer his bride to return to the light of day.
And Hermes found the king at home in his
palace, sitting on a couch, beside the shrinking
Persephone, consumed within herself by desire
for her mother. A doubtful smile passed over
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GREEK STUDIES
the face of Aidoneus ; yet he obeyed the message,
and bade Persephone return ; yet praying her a
little to have gentle thoughts of him, nor judge
him too hardly, who was also an immortal god.
And Persephone arose up quickly in great joy ;
only, ere she departed, he caused her to eat a
morsel of sweet pomegranate, designing secretly
thereby, that she should not remain always upon
earth, but might some time return to him. And
Aidoneus yoked the horses to his chariot ; and
Persephone ascended into it ; and Hermes took
the reins in his hands and drove out through the
infernal halls ; and the horses ran willingly ; and
they two quickly passed over the ways of that
long journey, neither the waters of the sea, nor
of the rivers, nor the deep ravines of the hills,
nor the cliffs of the shore, resisting them ; till
at last Hermes placed Persephone before the
door of the temple where her mother was ; who,
seeing her, ran out quickly to meet her, like a
Maenad coming down a mountain -side, dusky
with woods.
" So they spent all that day together in inti-
mate communion, having many things to hear
and tell. Then Zeus sent to them Rhea, his
venerable mother, the oldest of divine persons,
to bring them back reconciled, to the company
of the gods ; and he ordained that Persephone
should remain two parts of the year with her
mother, and one third part only with her husband,
in the kingdom of the dead. So Demeter suffered
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DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
the earth to yield its fruits once more, and the
land was suddenly laden with leaves and tiowers
and waving corn. Also she visited Triptolemus
and the other princes of Eleusis, and instructed
them in the performance of her sacred rites, —
those mysteries of which no tongue may speak.
Only, blessed is he whose eyes have seen them ;
his lot after death is not as the lot of other
men ! "
In the story of Demeter, as in all Greek
myths, we may trace the action of three differ-
ent influences, which have moulded it with
varying effects, in three successive phases of its
development. There is first its half-conscious,
instinctive, or mystical, phase, in which, under
the form of an unwritten legend, living from
mouth to mouth, and with details changing as
it passes from place to place, there lie certain
primitive impressions of the phenomena of the
natural world. We may trace it next in its
conscious, poetical or literary, phase, in which
the poets become the depositaries of the vague
instinctive product of the popular imagination,
and handle it with a purely literary interest,
fixing its outlines, and simplifying or developing
its situations. Thirdly, the myth passes into the
ethical phase, in which the persons and the
incidents of the poetical narrative are realised
as abstract symbols, because intensely character-
istic examples, of moral or spiritual conditions.
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Behind the adventures of the stealing of Per-
sephone and the wanderings of Demeter in search
of her, as we find them in the Homeric hymn,
we may discern the confused conception, under
which that early age, in which the myths were
first created, represented to itself those changes
in physical things, that order of summer and
winter, of which it had no scientific, or systematic
explanation, but in which, nevertheless, it divined
a multitude of living agencies, corresponding to
those ascertained forces, of which our colder
modern science tells the number and the names.
Demeter — Demeter and Persephone, at first, in a
sort of confused union — is the earth, in the fixed
order of its annual changes, but also in all the
accident and detail of the growth and decay of
its children. Of this conception, floating loosely
in the air, the poets of a later age take possession ;
they create Demeter and Persephone as we know
them in art and poetry. From the vague and
fluctuating union, in which together they had
represented the earth and its changes, the mother
and the daughter define themselves with special
functions, and with fixed, well-understood relation-
ships, the incidents and emotions of which soon
weave themselves into a pathetic story. Lastly,
in proportion as the literary or assthetic activity
completes the picture or the poem, the ethical
interest makes itself felt. These strange persons
— Demeter and Persephone — these marvellous
incidents — the translation into Hades, the seeking
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DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
of Demeter, the return of Persephone to her, —
lend themselves to the elevation and correction
of the sentiments of sorrow and awe, by the
presentment to the senses and the imagination of
an ideal expression of them. Demeter cannot but
seem the type of divine grief Persephone is the
goddess of death, yet with a promise of life to
come. Those three phases, then, which are more
or less discernible in all mythical development,
and constitute a natural order in it, based on the
necessary conditions of human apprehension, are
hxed more plainly, perhaps, than in any other
passage of Greek mythology in the story of
Demeter. And as the Homeric hymn is the
central expression of its literary or poetical phase,
so the marble remains, of which I shall have
to speak by and bye, are the central extant illus-
tration of what I have called its ethical phase.
Homer, in the Iliad, knows Demeter, but
only as the goddess of the fields, the originator
and patroness of the labours of the countryman,
in their yearly order. She stands, with her
hair yellow like the ripe corn, at the threshing-
floor, and takes her share in the toil, the heap
of grain whitening, as the flails, moving in the
wind, disperse the chaff. Out in the fresh fields,
she yields to the embraces of lasion, to the
extreme jealousy of Zeus, who slays her mortal
lover with lightning. The flowery town of
Pyrasus — the wheat-town^ — an ancient place in
Thessaly, is her sacred precinct. But when
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Homer gives a list of the orthodox gods, her
name is not mentioned.
Homer, in the Odyssey, knows Persephone
also, but not as Kore ; only as the queen of the
dead — iiraivT) U€p<r€<f)6vr) — dreadful Persephone, the
goddess of destruction and death, according to
the apparent import of her name. She accom-
plishes men's evil prayers ; she is the mistress
and manager of men's shades, to which she can
dispense a little more or less of life, dwelling in
her mouldering palace on the steep shore of the
Oceanus, with its groves of barren willows and
tall poplars. But that Homer knew her as the
daughter of Demeter there are no signs ; and of
his knowledge of the rape of Persephone there
is only the faintest sign, — he names Hades by
the golden reins of his chariot, and his beautiful
horses.
The main theme, then, the most characteristic
peculiarities, of the story, as subsequently de-
veloped, are not to be found, expressly, in the
true Homer. We have in him, on the one hand,
Demeter, as the perfectly fresh and blithe goddess
of the fields, whose children, if she has them,
must be as the perfectly discreet and peaceful,
unravished Kore ; on the other hand, we have
Persephone, as the wholly terrible goddess of
death, who brings to Ulysses the querulous
shadows of the dead, and has the head of the
gorgon Medusa in her keeping. And it is only
when these two contrasted images have been
94
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
brought into intimate relationship, only when
Kore and Persephone have been identified, that
the deeper mythology of Demeter begins.
This combination has taken place in Hesiod ;
and in three lines of the Theogony we find the steal-
ing of Persephone by Aidoneus,^ — one of those
things in Hesiod, perhaps, which are really older
than Homer. Hesiod has been called the poet
of helots, and is thought to have preserved some
of the traditions of those earlier inhabitants of
Greece who had become a kind of serfs ; and in
a certain shadowiness in his conceptions of the
gods, contrasting with the concrete and heroic
forms of the gods of Homer, we may perhaps
trace something of the quiet unspoken brooding
of a subdued people — of that silently dreaming
temper to which the story of Persephone properly
belongs. However this may be, it is in Hesiod
that the two images, unassociated in Homer —
the goddess of summer and the goddess of death,
Kore and Persephone — are identified with much
significance ; and that strange, dual being makes
her first appearance, whose latent capabilities the
poets afterwards developed ; among the rest, a
peculiar blending of those two contrasted aspects,
full of purpose for the duly chastened intelligence ;
death, resurrection, rejuvenescence. — Awake, and
sing, ye that dwell in the dust !
^ Theogony, 912-914 :
Ai>rip 6 A-fifirfrpot iro\v<f>6pPrit is X^xo» ^\BtP,
fj T^Kt YlfpcttpbvT)* \tvKil)\(vov, fjv 'A'iBwi'evi
^pTac€v ^j ira/xi fiijrpoi • fouKt 5i /np-Ura Z«/f.
95
GREEK STUDIES
Modern science explains the changes of the
natural world by the hypothesis of certain un-
conscious forces ; and the sum of these forces,
in their combined action, constitutes the scientific
conception of nature. But, side by side with
the growth of this more mechanical conception,
an older and more spiritual, Platonic, philosophy
has always maintained itself, a philosophy more
of instinct than of the understanding, the mental
starting-point of which is not an observed
sequence of outward phenomena, but some
such feeling as most of us have on the first
warmer days in spring, when we seem to feel
the genial processes of nature actually at work ;
as if just below the mould, and in the hard wood
of the trees, there were really circulating some
spirit of life, akin to that which makes its
energies felt within ourselves. Starting with a
hundred instincts such as this, that older un-
mechanical, spiritual, or Platonic, philosophy
envisages nature rather as the unity of a living
spirit or person, revealing itself in various degrees
to the kindred spirit of the observer, than as a
system of mechanical forces. Such a philosophy
is a systematised form of that sort of poetry (we
may study it, for instance, either in Shelley or
in Wordsworth), which also has its fancies of a
spirit of the earth, or of the sky, — a personal
intelligence abiding in them, the existence of
which is assumed in every suggestion such poetry
makes to us of a sympathy between the ways
96
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
and aspects of outward nature and the moods of
men. And what stood to the primitive intel-
ligence in place of such metaphysical conceptions
were those cosmical stories or myths, such as
this of Demeter and Persephone, which spring-
ing up spontaneously in many minds, came at
last to represent to them, in a certain number of
sensibly realised images, all they knew, felt, or
fancied, of the natural world about them. The
sky in its unity and its variety, — the sea in its
unity and its variety, — mirrored themselves
respectively in these simple, but profoundly im-
pressible spirits, as Zeus, as Glaucus or Poseidon.
And a large part of their experience — all, that
is, that related to the earth in its changes, the
growth and decay of all things born of it — was
covered by the story of Demeter, the myth of
the earth as a mother. They thought of
Demeter as the old Germans thought of Hertha,
or the later Greeks of Pan, as the Egyptians
thought of Isis, the land of the Nile, made green
by the streams of Osiris, for whose coming Isis
longs, as Demeter for Persephone ; thus naming
together in her all their fluctuating thoughts,
impressions, suspicions, of the earth and its
appearances, their whole complex divination of
a mysterious life, a perpetual working, a con-
tinous act of conception there. Or they thought
of the many-coloured earth as the garment of
Demeter, as the great modern pantheist poet
speaks of it as the " garment of God." Its
H 97
GREEK STUDIES
brooding fertility ; the spring flowers breaking
from its surface, the thinly disguised unhealth-
fulness of their heavy perfume, and of their
chosen places of growth ; the delicate, feminine,
Prosperina-like motion of all growing things ;
its fruit, full of drowsy and poisonous, or fresh,
reviving juices ; its sinister caprices also, its
droughts and sudden volcanic heats ; the long
delays of spring ; its dumb sleep, so suddenly
flung away ; the sadness which insinuates itself
into its languid luxuriance ; all this grouped
itself round the persons of Demeter and her
circle. They could turn always to her, from
the actual earth itself, in aweful yet hopeful
prayer, and a devout personal gratitude, and
explain it through her, in its sorrow and its
promise, its darkness and its helpfulness to man.
The personification of abstract ideas by
modern painters or sculptors, of wealth, of
commerce, of health, for instance, shocks, in
most cases, the esthetic sense, as something con-
ventional or rhetorical, as a mere transparent
allegory, or figure of speech, which could please
almost no one. On the other hand, such sym-
bolical representations, under the form of human
persons, as Giotto's Virtues and Vices at Padua,
or his Saint Poverty at Assisi, or the series of the
planets in certain early Italian engravings, are
profoundly poetical and impressive. They seem
to be something more than mere symbolism,
98
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
and to be connected with some peculiarly sym-
pathetic penetration, on the part of the artist,
into the subjects he intended to depict. Sym-
bolism intense as this, is the creation of a special
temper, in which a certain simplicity, taking all
things literally, c2u pied de la lettre^ is united to a
vivid pre-occupation with the aesthetic beauty of
the image itself, the figured side of figurative
expression, the form of the metaphor. When
it is said, " Out of his mouth goeth a sharp
sword," that temper is ready to deal directly and
boldly with that difficult image, like that old
designer of the fourteenth century, who has
depicted this, and other images of the Apocalypse,
in a coloured window at Bourges. Such sym-
bolism cares a great deal for the hair of Temper-
ance^ discreetly bound, for some subtler likeness
to the colour of the sky in the girdle of Hope^
for the inwoven flames in the red garment of
Charity. And what was specially peculiar to the
temper of the old Florentine painter, Giotto, to
the temper of his age in general, doubtless, more
than to that of ours, was the persistent and
universal mood of the age in which the story
of Demeter and Persephone was first created.
If some painter of our own time has conceived
the image of The Day so intensely, that we hardly
think of distinguishing between the image, with
its girdle of dissolving morning mist, and the
meaning of the image ; if William Blake, to
our so great delight, makes the morning stars
99
GREEK STUDIES
literally " sing together " — these fruits of indi-
vidual genius are in part also a " survival " from
a different age, with the whole mood of which
this mode of expression was more congruous
than it is with ours. But there are traces of the
old temper in the man of to-day also ; and
through these we can understand that earlier
time — a very poetical time, with the more highly
gifted peoples — in which every impression men
received of the action of powers without or
within them suggested to them the presence of
a soul or will, like their own — a person, with
a living spirit, and senses, and hands, and feet ;
which, when it talked of the return of Kore to
Demeter, or the marriage of Zeus and Here, was
not using rhetorical language, but yielding to a
real illusion ; to which the voice of man " was
really a stream, beauty an effluence, death a mist.'*
The gods of Greek mythology overlap each
other ; they are confused or connected with each
other, lightly or deeply, as the case may be, and
sometimes have their doubles, at first sight as in
a troubled dream, yet never, when we examine
each detail more closely, without a certain truth
to human reason. It is only in a limited sense
that it is possible to lift, and examine by itself,
one thread of the network of story and imagery,
which, in a certain age of civilisation, wove itself
over every detail of life and thought, over every
name in the past, and almost every place in
lOO
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
Greece. The storv of Demeter, then, was the
work of no single author or place or time ; the
poet of its first phase was no single person, but
the whole consciousness of an age, though an
age doubtless with its differences of more or less
imaginative individual minds — with one, here or
there, eminent, though but by a little, above a
merely receptive majority, the spokesman of a uni-
versal, though faintly-felt prepossession, attach-
ing the errant fancies of the people around him
to definite names and images. The myth grew
up gradually, and at many distant places, in m_any
minds, independent of each other, but dealing
in a common temper with certain elements and
aspects of the natural world, as one here, and
another there, seemed to catch in that incident
or detail which flashed more incisively than
others on the inward eye, some influence, or
feature, or characteristic of the great mother.
The various epithets of Demeter, the local
variations of her story, its incompatible inci-
dents, bear witness to the manner of its genera-
tion. They illustrate that indefiniteness which
is characteristic of Greek mythology, a theology
with no central authority, no link on historic
time, liable from the first to an unobserved trans-
formation. They indicate the various, far-distant
spots from which the visible body of the goddess
slowlv collected its constituents, and came at last
to have a well-defined existence in the popular
mind. In this sense, Demeter appears to one in
lOI
GREEK STUDIES
her anger, sullenly withholding the fruits of the
earth, to another in her pride of Persephone, to
another in her grateful gift of the arts of agri-
culture to man ; at last only, is there a general
recognition of a clearly-arrested outline, a tangible
embodiment, which has solidified itself in the
imagination of the people, they know not how.
The worship of Demeter belongs to that older
religion, nearer to the earth, which some have
thought they could discern, behind the more
definitely national mythology of Homer. She
is the goddess of dark caves, and is not wholly
free from monstrous form. She gave men the
first fig in one place, the first poppy in another ;
in another, she first taught the old Titans to
mow. She is the mother of the vine also ; and
the assumed name by which she called herself
in her wanderings, is Dos — a gift ; the crane, as
the harbinger of rain, is her messenger among
the birds. She knows the magic powers of
certain plants, cut from her bosom, to bane or
bless ; and, under one of her epithets, herself
presides over the springs, as also coming from
the secret places of the earth. She is the
goddess, then, at first, of the fertility of the
earth in its wildness ; and so far, her attributes
are to some degree confused with those of the
Thessalian Gaia and the Phrygian Cybele.
Afterwards, and it is now that her most character-
istic attributes begin to concentrate themselves,
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DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
she separates herself from these confused rela-
tionships, as specially the goddess of agriculture,
of the fertility of the earth when furthered by
human skill. She is the preserver of the seed
sown in hope, under many epithets derived from
the incidents of vegetation, as the simple country-
man names her, out of a mind full of the various
experiences of his little garden or farm. She
is the most definite embodiment of all those
riuctuating mystical instincts, of which Gaia,^
the mother of the earth's gloomier offspring, is
a vaguer and mistier one. There is nothing of
the confused outline, the mere shadowiness of
mystical dreaming, in this most concrete human
figure. No nation, less aesthetically gifted than
the Greeks, could have thus lightly thrown its
mystical surmise and divination into images so
clear and idyllic as those of the solemn goddess
of the country, in whom the characteristics of
the mother are expressed with so much tender-
ness, and the " beauteous head " of Kore, then
so fresh and peaceful.
In this phase, then, the story of Demeter
appears as the peculiar creation of country-people
of a high impressibility, dreaming over their
work in spring or autumn, half consciously
touched by a sense of its sacredness, and a sort of
* In the Homeric hymn, pre-eminently, of the flower which
grew up for the first time, to snare the footsteps of Kore, the
fair but deadly Narcissus, the flower of vapKi], the numbness of
death.
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GREEK STUDIES
mystery about it. For there is much in the life
of the farm everywhere which gives to persons
of any seriousness of disposition, special oppor-
tunity for grave and gentle thoughts. The
temper of people engaged in the occupations of
country life, so permanent, so " near to nature,"
is at all times alike ; and the habitual solemnity
of thought and expression which Wordsworth
found in the peasants of Cumberland, and the
painter Fran9ois Millet in the peasants of Brittany,
may well have had its prototype in early Greece.
And so, even before the development, by the
poets, of their aweful and passionate story,
Demeter and Persephone seem to have been
pre-eminently the venerable^ or aweful^ goddesses.
Demeter haunts the fields in spring, when the
young lambs are dropped ; she visits the barns
in autumn ; she takes part in mowing and bind-
ing up the corn, and is the goddess of sheaves.
She presides over all the pleasant, significant
details of the farm, the threshing-floor and the
full granary, and stands beside the woman baking
bread at the oven. With these fancies are
connected certain simple rites ; the half-under-
stood local observance, and the half- believed
local legend, reacting capriciously on each other.
They leave her a fragment of bread and a morsel
of meat, at the cross-roads, to take on her journey ;
and perhaps some real Demeter carries them
away, as she wanders through the country.
The incidents of their yearly labour become to
104
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
them acts of worship ; they seek her hlessing
through many expressive names, and almost
catch sight of her, at dawn or evening, in the
nooks of the fragrant fields. She lays a finger
on the grass at the road -side, and some new
flower comes up. All the picturesque imple-
ments of country life are hers ; the poppy also,
emblem of an inexhaustible fertility, and full
of mysterious juices for the alleviation of pain.
The countrywoman who puts her child to sleep
in the great, cradle-like, basket, for winnowing
the corn, remembers Demeter Courotrophos, the
mother of corn and children alike, and makes it
a little coat out of the dress worn by its father
at his initiation into her mysteries. Yet she is
an angry goddess too, sometimes — Demeter
Erinnys, the goblin of the neighbourhood, haunt-
ing its shadowy places. She lies on the ground
out of doors on summer nights, and becomes wet
with the dew. She grows young again every
spring, yet is of great age, the wrinkled woman
of the Homeric hymn, who becomes the nurse
of Demophoon. Other lighter, errant stories
nest themselves, as time goes on, within the
greater. The water-newt, which repels the lips
of the traveller who stoops to drink, is a certain
urchin. Abas, who spoiled by his mockery the
pleasure of the thirsting goddess, as she drank
once of a wayside spring in her wanderings.
The night - owl is the transformed Ascalabus,
who alone had seen Persephone eat that morsel
loS
GREEK STUDIES
of pomegranate, in the garden of Aidoneus. The
bitter wild mint was once a girl, who for a
moment had made her jealous, in Hades.
The episode of Triptolemus, to whom
Demeter imparts the mysteries of the plough,
like the details of some sacred rite, that he may
bear them abroad to all people, embodies, in
connexion with her, another group of the circum-
stances of country life. As with all the other
episodes of the story, there are here also local
variations, traditions of various favourites of the
goddess at different places, of whom grammarians
can tell us, finally obscured behind the greater
fame of Triptolemus of Eleusis. One might
fancy, at first, that Triptolemus was a quite
Boeotian divinity, of the ploughshare. Yet we
know that the thoughts of the Greeks concern-
ing the culture of the earth from which they
came, were most often noble ones ; and if we
examine carefully the works of ancient art which
represent him, the second thought will suggest
itself, that there was nothing clumsy or coarse
about this patron of the plough — something,
rather, of the movement of delicate wind or fire,
about him and his chariot. And this finer
character is explained, if, as we are justified in
doing, we bring him into closest connexion with
that episode, so full of a strange mysticism, of
the Nursing of Demophoon^ in the Homeric hymn.
For, according to some traditions, none other
1 06
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
than Triptolemus himself was the subject of that
mysterious experiment, in which Demeter laid
the child nightly, in the red heat of the fire ;
and he lives afterwards, not immortal indeed, not
wholly divine, yet, as Shakspere says, a " nimble
spirit," feeling little of the weight of the material
world about him — the element of winged fire in
the clay. The delicate, fresh, farm-lad we may
still actually see sometimes, like a graceful field-
flower among the corn, becomes, in the sacred
legend of agriculture, a king's son ; and then,
the fire having searched out from him the
grosser elements on that famous night, all com-
pact now of spirit, a priest also, administering
the gifts of Demeter to all the earth. Certainly,
the extant works of art which represent him,
gems or vase-paintings, conform truly enough to
this ideal of a " nimble spirit," though he wears
the broad country hat, which Hermes also wears,
going swiftly, half on the airy, mercurial wheels
of his farm instrument, harrow or plough — half
on wings of serpents — the worm, symbolical of
the soil, but winged, as sending up the dust
committed to it, after subtle firing, in colours
and odours of fruit and flowers. It is an alto-
gether sacred character, again, that he assumes
in another precious work, of the severer period
of Greek art, lately discovered at Eleusis, and
now preserved in the museum of Athens, a
singularly refined bas-relief, in which he stands,
a firm and serious youth, between Demeter and
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GREEK STUDIES
Persephone, who places her hand as with some
sacred influence, and consecrating gesture, upon
him.
But the house of the prudent countryman
will be, of course, a place of honest manners ;
and Demeter Thesmophoros is the guardian of
married life, the deity of the discretion of wives.
She is therefore the founder of civilised order.
The peaceful homes of men, scattered about the
land, in their security — Demeter represents these
fruits of the earth also, not without a suggestion
of the white cities, which shine upon the hills
above the waving fields of corn, seats of justice
and of true kingship. She is also in a certain
sense the patron of travellers, having, in her
long wanderings after Persephone, recorded and
handed down those omens, caught from little
things — the birds which crossed her path, the
persons who met her on the way, the words they
said, the things they carried in their hands,
elvoBta avfi^oka — by noting which, men bring
their journeys to a successful end ; so that the
simple countryman may pass securely on his way ;
and is led by signs from the goddess herself,
when he travels far to visit her, at Hermione or
Eleusis.
So far the attributes of Demeter and Kore
are similar. In the mythical conception, as in
the religious acts connected with it, the mother
and the daughter are almost interchangeable ;
io8
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
they are the two goddesses, the twin- named.
Gradually, the office of Persephone is developed,
defines itself; functions distinct from those of
Demeter are attributed to her. Hitherto, always
at the side of Demeter and sharing her worship,
she now appears detached from her, going and
coming, on her mysterious business. A third
part of the year she abides in darkness ; she
comes up in the spring ; and every autumn,
when the countryman sows his seed in the
earth, she descends thither again, and the world
of the dead lies open, spring and autumn, to
let her in and out. Persephone, then, is the
summer-time, and, in this sense, a daughter of
the earth ; but the summer as bringing winter ;
the flowery splendour and consummated glory of
the year, as thereafter immediately beginning to
draw near to its end, as the first yellow leaf
crosses it, in the first severer wind. She is the
last day of spring, or the first day of autumn, in
the threefold division of the Greek year. Her
story is, indeed, but the story, in an intenser
form, of Adonis, of Hyacinth, of Adrastus — the
king's blooming son, fated, in the story of
Herodotus, to be wounded to death with an
iron spear — of Linus, a fair child who is torn
to pieces by hounds every spring-time — of the
English Sleeping Beauty. From being the
goddess of summer and the flowers, she becomes
the goddess of night and sleep and death, con-
fuseable with Hecate, the goddess of midnight
109
GREEK STUDIES
terrors, — Koprj appriro<i, the mother of the Erinnyes,
who appeared to Pindar, to warn him of his
approaching death, upbraiding him because he
had made no hymn in her praise, which swan*s
song he thereupon began, but finished with her.
She is a twofold goddess, therefore, according as
one or the other of these two contrasted aspects
of her nature is seized, respectively. A duality,
an inherent opposition in the very conception of
Persephone, runs all through her story, and is
part of her ghostly power. There is ever some-
thing in her of a divided or ambiguous identity :
hence the many euphemisms of later language
concerning her.
The " worship of sorrow," as Goethe called
it, is sometimes supposed to have had almost
no place in the religion of the Greeks. Their
religion has been represented as a religion of
mere cheerfulness, the worship by an untroubled,
unreflecting humanity, conscious of no deeper
needs, of the embodiments of its own joyous
activity. It helped to hide out of their sight
those traces of decay and weariness, of which the
Greeks were constitutionally shy, to keep them
from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy
places, appropriate enough to the gloomy imagina-
tion of the middle age ; and it hardly proposed
to itself to give consolation to people who, in
truth, were never " sick or sorry." But this
familiar view of Greek religion is based on ^
consideration of a part only of what is known
no
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
concerning it, and really involves a misconception,
akin to that which underestimates the influence
of the romantic spirit generally, in Greek poetry
and art ; as if Greek art had dealt exclusively
with human nature in its sanity, suppressing all
motives of strangeness, all the beauty which is
born of difficulty, permitting nothing but an
Olympian, though perhaps somewhat wearisome
calm. In effect, such a conception of Greek art
and poetry leaves in the central expressions of
Greek culture none but negative qualities ; and
the legend of Demeter and Persephone, perhaps
the most popular of all Greek legends, is sufficient
to show that the " worship of sorrow " was not
without its function in Greek religion ; their
legend is a legend made by and for sorrowful,
wistful, anxious people ; while the most import-
ant artistic monuments of that legend sufficiently
prove that the Romantic spirit was really at
work in the minds of Greek artists, extracting
by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not with-
out the elements of tranquillity, of dignity and
order, out of a matter, at first sight painful and
strange.
The student of origins^ as French critics say,
of the earliest stages of art and poetry, must
be content to follow faint traces ; and in what
has been here said, much may seem to have
been made of little, with too much completion,
by a general framework or setting, of what after
III
GREEK STUDIES
all are but doubtful or fragmentary indications.
Yet there is a certain cynicism too, in that over-
positive temper, which is so jealous of our catch-
ing any resemblance in the earlier world to the
thoughts that really occupy our own minds, and
which, in its estimate of the actual fragments of
antiquity, is content to find no seal of human
intelligence upon them. Slight indeed in them-
selves, these fragmentary indications become
suggestive of much, when viewed in the light of
such general evidence about the human imagina-
tion as is afforded by the theory of " comparative
mythology," or what is called the theory of
" animism." Only, in the application of these
theories, the student of Greek religion must
never forget that, after all, it is with poetry, not
with systematic theological belief or dogma, that
he has to do. As regards this story of Demeter
and Persephone, what we actually possess is some
actual fragments of poetry, some actual fragments
of sculpture ; and with a curiosity, justified by the
direct aesthetic beauty of these fragments, we feel
our way backwards to that engaging picture of
the poet-people, with which the ingenuity of
modern theory has filled the void in our know-
ledge. The abstract poet of that first period of
mythology, creating in this wholly impersonal,
intensely spiritual way, — the abstract spirit of
poetry itself, rises before the mind ; and, in speak-
ing of this poetical age, we must take heed, before
all things, in no sense to misconstrue the poets.
112
II
The stories of the Greek mythology, like other
things which belong to no man, and for which
no one in particular is responsible, had their
fortunes. In that world of floating fancies there
was a struggle for life ; there were myths which
never emerged from that first stage of popular
conception, or were absorbed by stronger com-
petitors, because, as some true heroes have done,
they lacked the sacred poet or prophet, and were
never remodelled by literature ; while, out of
the myth of Demeter, under the careful conduct
of poetry and art, came the little pictures, the
idylls, of the Homeric hymn, and the gracious
imagery of Praxiteles. The myth has now
entered its second or poetical phase, then, in
which more definite fancies are grouped about
the primitive stock, in a conscious literary temper,
and the whole interest settles round the images
of the beautiful girl going down into the darkness,
and the weary woman who seeks her lost daughter
— divine persons, then sincerely believed in by
the majority of the Greeks. The Homeric hymn
I 113
GREEK STUDIES
is the central monument of this second phase.
In it, the changes of the natural year have become
a personal history, a story of human affection
and sorrow, yet with a far-reaching religious
significance also, of which the mere earthly spring
and autumn are but an analogy ; and in the
development of this human element, the writer
of the hymn sometimes displays a genuine power
of pathetic expression. The whole episode of
the fostering of Demophoon, in which over the
body of the dying child human longing and
regret are blent so subtly with the mysterious
design of the goddess to make the child immortal,
is an excellent example of the sentiment of pity
in literature. Yet though it has reached the
stage of conscious literary interpretation, much
of its early mystical or cosmical character still
lingers about the story, as it is here told. Later
mythologists simply define the personal history ;
but in this hymn we may, again and again, trace
curious links of connexion with the original
purpose of the myth. Its subject is the weary
woman, indeed, our Lady of Sorrows, the mater
dolorosa of the ancient world, but with a certain
latent reference, all through, to the mystical
person of the earth. Her robe of dark blue is
the raiment of her mourning, but also the blue
robe of the earth in shadow, as we see it in
Titian*s landscapes ; her great age is the age of
the immemorial earth ; she becomes a nurse,
therefore, holding Demophoon in her bosom ;
114
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
the folds of her garment are fragrant, not merely
with the incense of Eleusis, but with the natural
perfume of flowers and fruit. The sweet breath
with w^hich she nourishes the child Demophoon,
is the warm west wind, feeding all germs of
vegetable life ; her bosom, where he lies, is the
bosom of the earth, with its strengthening heat,
reserved and shy, offended if human eyes scrutinise
too closely its secret chemistry ; it is with the
earth's natural surface of varied colour that she
has, " in time past, given pleasure to the sun " ;
the yellow hair which falls suddenly over her
shoulders, at her transformation in the house of
Celeus, is still partly the golden corn ; — in art
and poetry she is ever the blond goddess ; tarry-
ing in her temple, of which an actual hollow
in the earth is the prototype, among the spicy
odours of the Eleusinian ritual, she is the spirit
of the earth, lying hidden in its dark folds until
the return of spring, among the flower-seeds and
fragrant roots, like the seeds and aromatic woods
hidden in the wrappings of the dead. Through-
out the poem, we have a sense of a certain near-
ness to nature, surviving from an earlier world ;
the sea is understood as a person, yet is still the
real sea, with the waves moving. When it is
said that no bird gave Demeter tidings of Perse-
phone, we feel that to that earlier world, ways
of communication between all creatures may have
seemed open, which are closed to us. It is Iris
who brings to Demeter the message of Zeus ;
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GREEK STUDIES
that is, the rainbow signifies to the earth the
good-will of the rainy sky towards it. Persephone
springing up with great joy from the couch of
Aidoneus, to return to her mother, is the sudden
outburst of the year. The heavy and narcotic
aroma of spring flowers hangs about her, as
about the actual spring. And this mingling
of the primitive cosmical import of the myth
with the later, personal interests of the story, is
curiously illustrated by the place which the poem
assigns to Hecate. This strange Titaness is, first,
a nymph only ; afterwards, as if changed incur-
ably by the passionate cry of Persephone, she
becomes her constant attendant, and is even
identified with her. But in the Homeric hymn
her lunar character is clear ; she is really the
moon only, who hears the cry of Persephone,
as the sun saw her, when Aidoneus carried her
away. One morning, as the mother wandered,
the moon appeared, as it does in its last quarter,
rising very bright, just before dawn ; that is, in
the words of the Homeric hymn — "on the tenth
morning Hecate met her, having a light in her
hands." The fascinating, but enigmatical figure,
"sitting ever in her cave, half-veiled with a
shining veil, thinking delicate thoughts," in
which we seem to see the subject of some picture
of the Italian Renaissance, is but the lover of
Endymion — like Persephone, withdrawn, in her
season, from the eyes of men. The sun saw her ;
the moon saw her not, but heard her cry, and is
ii6
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
ever after the half-veiled attendant of the queen
of dreams and of the dead.
But the story of Demeter and Persephone
lends itself naturally to description, and it is in
descriptive beauties that the Homeric hymn
excels ; its episodes are finished designs, and
directly stimulate the painter and the sculptor
to a rivalry with them. Weaving the names of
the flowers into his verse, names familiar to us
in English, though their Greek originals are
uncertain, the writer sets Persephone before us,
herself like one of them — KoKuKco-m^; — like the
budding calyx of a flower, — in a picture, which,
in its mingling of a quaint freshness and simpli-
city with a certain earnestness, reads like a
description of some early Florentine design, such
as Sandro Botticelli's Allegory of the Seasons, By
an exquisite chance also, a common metrical
expression connects the perfume of the newly-
created narcissus with the salt odour of the sea.
Like one of those early designs also, but with a
deeper infusion of religious earnestness, is the
picture of Demeter sitting at the wayside, in
shadow as always, with the well of water and
the olive-tree. She has been journeying all
night, and now it is morning, and the daughters
of Celeus bring their vessels to draw water.
That image of the seated Demeter, resting after
her long flight " through the dark continent,"
or in the house of Celeus, when she refuses the
red wine, or again, solitary, in her newly-finished
117
GREEK STUDIES
temple of Eleusis, enthroned in her grief, fixed
itself deeply on the Greek imagination, and
became a favourite subject of Greek artists.
When the daughters of Celeus come to conduct
her to Eleusis, they come as in a Greek frieze,
full of energy and motion and waving lines, but
with gold and colours upon it. Eleusis — coming
— the coming of Demeter thither, as thus told in
the Homeric hymn, is the central instance in
Greek mythology of such divine appearances.
" She leaves for a season the company of the
gods and abides among men ; " and men's merit
is to receive her in spite of appearances. Meta-
neira and others, in the Homeric hymn, partly
detect her divine character ; they find x^pt? — a
certain gracious air — about her, which makes
them think her, perhaps, a royal person in dis-
guise. She becomes in her long wanderings
almost wholly humanised, and in return, she
and Persephone, alone of the Greek gods, seem
to have been the objects of a sort of personal
love and loyalty. Yet they are ever the solemn
goddesses, — 6eal ceiivai, the word expressing re-
ligious awe, the Greek sense of the divine
presence.
Plato, in laying down the rules by which the
poets are to be guided in speaking about divine
things to the citizens of the ideal republic,
forbids all those episodes of mythology which
represent the gods as assuming various forms,
and visiting the earth in disguise. Below the
ii8
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
express reasons which he assigns for this rule,
we may perhaps detect that instinctive antagonism
to the old HeracHtean philosophy of perpetual
change, which forces him, in his theory of morals
and the state, of poetry and music, of dress and
manners even, and of style in the very vessels
and furniture of daily life, on an austere simpli-
city, the older Dorian or Egyptian type of a
rigid, eternal immobility. The disintegrating,
centrifugal inHuence, which had penetrated, as
he thought, political and social existence, making
men too myriad-minded, had laid hold on the
life of the gods also, and, even in their calm
sphere, one could hardly identify a single divine
person as himself, and not another. There must,
then, be no doubling, no disguises, no stories of
transformation. The modern reader, however,
will hardly acquiesce in this " improvement " of
Greek mythology. He finds in these stories,
like that, for instance, of the appearance of
Athene to Telemachus, in the first book of the
Odyssey, which has a quite biblical mysticity
and solemnity, — stories in which, the hard
material outline breaking up, the gods lay aside
their visible form like a garment, yet remain
essentially themselves, — not the least spiritual
element of Greek religion, an evidence of the
sense therein of unseen presences, which might
at any moment cross a man's path, to be recog-
nised, in half disguise, by the more delicately
trained eye, here or there, by one and not by
119
GREEK STUDIES
another. Whatever religious elements they
lacked, they had at least this sense of subtler
and more remote ways of personal presence.
And as there are traces in the Homeric hymn
of the primitive cosmical myth, relics of the first
stage of the development of the story, so also
many of its incidents are probably suggested by
the circumstances and details of the Eleusinian
ritual. There were religious usages before there
were distinct religious conceptions, and these
antecedent religious usages shape and determine,
at many points, the ultimate religious conception,
as the details of the myth interpret or explain
the religious custom. The hymn relates the
legend of certain holy places, to which various
impressive religious rites had attached them-
selves— the holy well, the old fountain, the stone
of sorrow, which it was the office of the " inter-
preter " of the holy places to show to the people.
The sacred way which led from Athens to
Eleusis was rich in such memorials. The nine
days of the wanderings of Demeter in the
Homeric hymn are the nine days of the duration
of the greater or autumnal mysteries ; the jesting
of the old woman lambe, who endeavours to
make Demeter smile, are the customary mockeries
with which the worshippers, as they rested on
the bridge, on the seventh day of the feast,
assailed those who passed by. The torches in
the hands of Demeter are borrowed from the
same source ; and the shadow in which she is
120
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
constantly represented, and which is the peculiar
sign of her grief, is partly ritual, and a relic of
the caves of the old Chthonian worship, partly
poetical — expressive, half of the dark earth to
which she escapes from Olympus, half of her
mourning. She appears consistently, in the
hymn, as a teacher of rites, transforming daily
life, and the processes of life, into a religious
solemnity. With no misgiving as to the pro-
prieties of a mere narration, the hymn-writer
mingles these symbolical imitations with the
outlines of the original story ; and, in his
Demeter, the dramatic person of the mysteries
mixes itself with the primitive mythical figure.
And the worshipper, far from being offended by
these interpolations, may have found a special
impressiveness in them, as they linked continu-
ously its inner sense with the outward imagery
of the ritual.
And, as Demeter and her story embodied
themselves gradually in the Greek imagination,
so these mysteries in which her worship found
its chief expression, grew up little by little,
growing always in close connexion with the
modifications of the story, sometimes prompting
them, at other times suggested by them. That
they had a single special author is improbable,
and a mere invention of the Greeks, ignorant of
their real history and the general analogy of
such matters. Here again, as in the story itself,
the idea of development, of degrees, of a slow
121
GREEK STUDIES
and natural growth, impeded here, diverted
there, is the illuminating thought which earlier
critics lacked. " No tongue may speak of them,"
says the Homeric hymn ; and the secret has
certainly been kept. The antiquarian, dealing,
letter by letter, with what is recorded of them,
has left few certain data for the reflexion of the
modern student of the Greek religion ; and of
this, its central solemnity, only a fragmentary
picture can be made. It is probable that these
mysteries developed the symbolical significance
of the story of the descent into Hades, the com-
ing of Demeter to Eleusis, the invention of
Persephone. They may or may not have been
the vehicle of a secret doctrine, but were certainly
an artistic spectacle, giving, like the mysteries of
the middle age, a dramatic representation of the
sacred story, — perhaps a detailed performance,
perhaps only such a conventional representation,
as was afforded for instance by the medieval
ceremonies of Palm Sunday ; the whole, probably,
centering in an image of Demeter — the work of
Praxiteles or his school, in ivory and gold. There
is no reason to suppose any specific difference
between the observances of the Eleusinian festival
and the accustomed usages of the Greek religion ;
nocturns, libations, quaint purifications, proces-
sions— are common incidents of all Greek wor-
ship ; in all religious ceremonies there is an
element of dramatic symbolism ; and what we
really do see, through those scattered notices,
122
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
are things which have their parallels in a later
age, the whole being not altogether unlike a
modern pilgrimage. The exposition of the
sacred places — the threshing-floor of Triptolemus,
the rocky seat on which Demeter had rested in
her sorrow, the well of Callichorus — is not so
strange, as it would seem, had it no modern
illustration. The libations, at once a watering
of the vines and a drink-offering to the dead —
still needing men's services, waiting for purifica-
tion perhaps, or thirsting, like Dante's Adam of
Brescia, in their close homes — must, to almost
all minds, have had a certain natural impressive-
ness ; and a parallel has sometimes been drawn
between this festival and All Souls' Day.
And who, everywhere, has not felt the
mystical influence of that prolonged silence, the
mystic silence, from which the very word
" mystery " has its origin ? Something also
there undoubtedly was, which coarser minds
might misunderstand. On one day, the initiated
went in procession to the sea-coast, where they
underwent a purification by bathing in the sea.
On the fifth night there was the torchlight pro-
cession ; and, by a touch of real life in him, we
gather from the first page of Plato's Republic that
such processions were popular spectacles, having
a social interest, so that people made much of
attending them. There was the procession of
the sacred basket filled with poppy -seeds and
pomegranates. There was the day of rest, after
123
GREEK STUDIES
the stress and excitement of the " great night."
On the sixth day, the image of lacchus, son of
Demeter, crowned with myrtle and having a
torch in its hand, was carried in procession,
through thousands of spectators, along the sacred
way, amid joyous shouts and songs. We have
seen such processions ; we understand how many
different senses, and how lightly, various spectators
may put on them ; how little definite meaning
they may have even for those who officiate in
them. Here, at least, there was the image itself,
in that age, with its close connexion between
religion and art, presumably fair. Susceptibility
to the impressions of religious ceremonial must
always have varied with the peculiarities of in-
dividual temperament, as it varies in our own day ;
and Eleusis, with its incense and sweet singing,
may have been as little interesting to the out-
ward senses of some worshippers there, as the
stately and affecting ceremonies of the medieval
church to many of its own members. In a
simpler yet profounder sense than has sometimes
been supposed, these things were really addressed
to the initiated only.-^
We have to travel a long way from the
Homeric hymn to the hymn of Callimachus, who
writes in the end of Greek literature, in the
third century before Christ, in celebration of the
procession of the sacred basket of Demeter, not
* The great Greek myths are, in truth, like abstract forces, which
ally themselves to various conditions.
124
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
at the Attic, but at the Alexandrian Eleusinia.
He developes, in something of the prosaic spirit
of a medieval writer of " mysteries," one of the
burlesque incidents of the story, the insatiable
hunger which seized on Erysichthon because he
cut down a grove sacred to the goddess. Yet he
finds his opportunities for skilful touches of
poetry ; — " As the four white horses draw her
sacred basket," he says, " so will the great goddess
bring us a white spring, a white summer." He
describes the grove itself, with its hedge of trees,
so thick that an arrow could hardly pass through,
its pines and fruit-trees and tall poplars within,
and the water, like pale gold, running from the
conduits. It is one of those famous poplars that
receives the first stroke ; it sounds heavily to its
companion trees, and Demeter perceives that her
sacred grove is suffering. Then comes one of
those transformations which Plato will not allow.
Vainly anxious to save the lad from his ruin, she
appears in the form of a priestess, but with the
long hood of the goddess, and the poppy in her
hand ; and there is something of a real shudder,
some still surviving sense of a haunting presence
in the groves, in the verses which describe her
sudden revelation, when the workmen flee away,
leaving their axes in the cleft trees.
Of the same age as the hymn of Callimachus,
but with very different qualities, is the idyll of
Theocritus on the Shepherds' 'Journey. Although
it is possible to define an epoch in mythological
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development in which literary and artificial
influences began to remodel the primitive, popular
legend, yet still, among children, and unchanging
childlike people, we may suppose that that primi-
tive stage always survived, and the old, instinctive
influences were still at work. As the subject of
popular religious celebrations also, the myth was
still the property of the people, and surrendered
to its capricious action. The shepherds in
Theocritus, on th;;ir way to celebrate one of the
more homely feasts of Demeter, about the time
of harvest, are examples of these childlike people ;
the age of the poets has long since come, but
they are of the older and simpler order, lingering
on in the midst of a more self-conscious world.
In an idyll, itself full of the delightful gifts of
Demeter, Theocritus sets them before us ;
through the blazing summer day's journey, the
smiling image of the goddess is always before
them ; and now they have reached the end of
their journey : —
" So I, and Eucritus, and the fair Amyntichus,
turned aside into the house of Phrasidamus, and
lay down with delight in beds of sweet tamarisk
and fresh cuttings from the vines, strewn on the
ground. Many poplars and elm - trees were
waving over our heads, and not far off the running
of the sacred water from the cave of the nymphs
warbled to us ; in the shimmering branches the
sun-burnt grasshoppers were busy with their talk,
and from afar the little owl cried softly, out of
126
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
the tangled thorns of the blackberry ; the larks
were singing and the hedge-birds, and the turtle-
dove moaned ; the bees flew round and round the
fountains, murmuring softly ; the scent of late
summer and of the fall of the year was every-
where ; the pears fell from the trees at our feet,
and apples in number rolled down at our sides,
and the young plum-trees were bent to the earth
with the weight of their fruit. The wax, four
years old, was loosed from the heads of the wine-
jars. O ! nymphs of Castalia, who dwell on the
steeps of Parnassus, tell me, I pray you, was it a
draught like this that the aged Chiron placed
before Hercules, in the stony cave of Pholus ?
Was it nectar like this that made the mighty
shepherd on Anapus' shore, Polyphemus, who
flung the rocks upon Ulysses' ships, dance among
his sheepfolds ? — A cup like this ye poured out
now upon the altar of Demeter, who presides
over the threshing-floor. May it be mine, once
more, to dig my big winnowing-fan through her
heaps of corn ; and may I see her smile upon me,
holding poppies and handfuls of corn in her two
hands ! "
Some of the modifications of the story of
Demeter, as we find it in later poetry, have been
supposed to be due, not to the genuine action of
the Greek mind, but to the influence of that so-
called Orphic literature, which, in the generation
succeeding Hesiod, brought, from Thessaly and
Phrygia, a tide of mystical ideas into the Greek
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religion, sometimes, doubtless, confusing the clear-
ness and naturalness of its original outlines, but
also sometimes imparting to them a new and
peculiar grace. Under the influence of this
Orphic poetry, Demeter was blended, or identi-
fied, with Rhea Cybele, the mother of the gods,
the wilder earth -goddess of Phrygia ; and the
romantic figure of Dionysus Zagreus, Dionysus
the Hunter^ that most interesting, though some-
what melancholy variation on the better known
Dionysus, was brought, as son or brother of
Persephone, into her circle, the mystical vine,
who, as Persephone descends and ascends from
the earth, is rent to pieces by the Titans every
year and remains long in Hades, but every spring-
time comes out of it again, renewing his youth.
This identification of Demeter with Rhea Cybele
is the motive which has inspired a beautiful
chorus in the Helena — the new Helena — of
Euripides, that great lover of all subtle refine-
ments and modernisms, who, in this play, has
worked on a strange version of the older story,
which relates that Helen had never really gone
to Troy at all, but sent her soul only there, apart
from her sweet body, which abode all that time
in Egypt, at the court of King Proteus, where
she is found at last by her husband Menelaus, so
that the Trojan war was about a phantom, after
all. The chorus has even less than usual to do
with the action of the play, being linked to it
only by a sort of parallel, which may be under-
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DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
stood, between Menelaus seeking Helen, and
Demeter seeking Persephone. Euripides, then,
takes the matter of the Homeric hymn into the
region of a higher and swifter poetry, and connects
it with the more stimulating imagery of the
Idaean mother. The Orphic mysticism or enthusi-
asm has been admitted into the story, which is
now full of excitement, the motion of rivers, the
sounds of the Bacchic cymbals heard over the
mountains, as Demeter wanders among the woody
valleys seeking her lost daughter, all directly
expressed in the vivid Greek words. Demeter
is no longer the subdued goddess of the quietly-
ordered fields, but the mother of the gods, who
has her abode in the heights of Mount Ida, who
presides over the dews and waters of the white
springs, whose flocks feed, not on grain, but on
the curling tendrils of the vine, both of which
she withholds in her anger, and whose chariot is
drawn by wild beasts, fruit and emblem of the
earth in its fiery strength. Not Hecate, but
Pallas and Artemis, in full armour, swift-footed,
vindicators of chastity, accompany her in her
search for Persephone, who is already expressly,
KopT] appr)To<i — "the maiden whom none may
name." When she rests from her long wander-
ings, it is into the stony thickets of Mount Ida,
deep with snow, that she throws herself, in her
profound grief. When Zeus desires to end her
pain, the Muses and the " solemn " Graces are
sent to dance and sing before her. It is then
K 129
GREEK STUDIES
that Cypris, the goddess of beauty, and the
original cause, therefore, of her distress, takes
into her hands the brazen tambourines of the
Dionysiac worship with their Chthonian or deep-
noted sound ; and it is she, not the old lambe,
who with this wild music, heard thus for the
first time, makes Demeter smile at last. " Great,"
so the chorus ends with a picture, " great is the
power of the stoles of spotted fawn-skins, and
the green leaves of ivy twisted about the sacred
wands, and the wheeling motion of the tambourine
whirled round in the air, and the long hair
floating unbound in honour of Bromius, and the
nocturns of the goddess, when the moon looks
full upon them."
The poem of Claudian on the Rape of Proser-
pine^ the longest extant work connected with the
story of Demeter, yet itself unfinished, closes the
world of classical poetry. Writing in the fourth
century of the Christian era, Claudian has his
subject before him in the whole extent of its
various development, and also profits by those
many pictorial representations of it, which, from
the famous picture of Polygnotus downwards,
delighted the ancient world. His poem, then,
besides having an intrinsic charm, is valuable for
some reflexion in it of those lost works, being
itself pre-eminently a work in colour, and
excelling in a kind of painting in words, which
brings its subject very pleasantly almost to the
eye of the reader. The mind of this late votary
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OEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
of the old gods, in a world rapidly changing, is
crowded with all the beautiful forms generated
by mythology, and now about to be forgotten.
In this after-glow of Latin literature, lighted up
long after their fortune had set, and just before
their long night began, they pass before us, in
his verses, with the utmost clearness, like the
figures in an actual procession. The nursing of
the infant Sun and Moon by Tethys ; Proserpine
and her companions gathering flowers at early
dawn, when the violets are drinking in the dew,
still lying white upon the grass ; the image of
Pallas winding the peaceful blossoms about the
steel crest of her helmet ; the realm of Proserpine,
softened somewhat by her coming, and filled with
a quiet joy ; the matrons of Elysium crowding
to her marriage toilet, with the bridal veil of
yellow in their hands ; the Manes, crowned
with ghostly flowers yet warmed a little, at the
marriage feast ; the ominous dreams of the
mother ; the desolation of the home, like an
empty bird's-nest or an empty fold, when she
returns and finds Proserpine gone, and the spider
at work over her unfinished embroidery ; the
strangely-figured raiment, the flowers in the
grass, which were once blooming youths, having
both their natural colour and the colour of their
poetry in them, and the clear little fountain there,
which was once the maiden Cyane ; — all this is
shown in a series of descriptions, like the designs
in some unwinding tapestry, like Proserpine's own
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GREEK STUDIES
embroidery, the description of which is the most
brilliant of these pictures, and, in its quaint con-
fusion of the images of philosophy with those of
mythology, anticipates something of the fancy of
the Italian Renaissance.
" Proserpina, filling the house soothingly with
her low song, was working a gift against the
return of her mother, with labour all to be in
vain. In it, she marked out with her needle the
houses of the gods and the series of the elements,
showing by what law, nature, the parent of all,
settled the strife of ancient times, and the seeds
of things disparted into their places ; the lighter
elements are borne aloft, the heavier fall to the
centre ; the air grows bright with heat, a blazing
light whirls round the firmament ; the sea flows ;
the earth hangs suspended in its place. And
there were divers colours in it ; she illuminated
the stars with gold, infused a purple shade into
the water, and heightened the shore with gems
of flowers ; and, under her skilful hand, the
threads, with their inwrought lustre, swell up,
in momentary counterfeit of the waves ; you
might think that the sea-wind flapped against
the rocks, and that a hollow murmur came
creeping over the thirsty sands. She puts in
the five zones, marking with a red ground the
midmost zone, possessed by burning heat ; its
outline was parched and stiff; the threads seemed
thirsty with the constant sunshine ; on either
side lay the two zones proper for human life,
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DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
where a gentle temperance reigns ; and at the
extremes she drew the twin zones of numbing
cold, making her work dun and sad with the
hues of perpetual frost. She paints in, too, the
sacred places of Dis, her father's brother, and
the Manes, so fatal to her ; and an omen of her
doom was not wanting ; for, as she worked, as
if with foreknowledge of the future, her face
became wet with a sudden burst of tears. And
now, in the utmost border of the tissue, she had
begun to wind in the wavy line of the river
Oceanus, with its glassy shallows ; but the door
sounds on its hinges, and she perceives the
goddesses coming ; the unfinished work drops
from her hands, and a ruddy blush lights up
in her clear and snow-white face."
I have reserved to the last what is perhaps
the daintiest treatment of this subject in classical
literature, the account of it which Ovid gives in
the Fasti — a kind of Roman Calendar — for the
seventh of April, the day of the games of Ceres.
He tells over again the old story, with much
of which, he says, the reader will be already
familiar ; but he has something also of his own
to add to it, which the reader will hear for the
first time ; and, like one of those old painters
who, in depicting a scene of Christian history,
drew from their own fancy or experience its
special setting and accessories, he translates the
story into something very different from the
Homeric hymn. The writer of the Homeric
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hymn had made Celeus a king, and represented
the scene at Eleusis in a fair palace, like the
Venetian painters who depict the persons of the
Holy Family with royal ornaments. Ovid, on
the other hand, is more like certain painters of
the early Florentine school, who represent the
holy persons amid the more touching circum-
stances of humble life ; and the special something
of his own which he adds, is a pathos caught
from homely things, not without a delightful,
just perceptible, shade of humour even, so rare in
such work. All the mysticism has disappeared ;
but, instead, we trace something of that "worship
of sorrow," which has been sometimes sup-
posed to have had no place in classical religious
sentiment. In Ovid's well -finished elegiacs,
Persephone's flower -gathering, the Anthology^
reaches its utmost delicacy ; but I give the fol-
lowing episode for the sake of its pathetic
expression,
" After many wanderings Ceres was come to
Attica. There, in the utmost dejection, for the
first time, she sat down to rest on a bare stone,
which the people of Attica still call the stone of
sorrow. For many days she remained there
motionless, under the open sky, heedless of the
rain and of the frosty moonlight. Places have
their fortunes ; and what is now the illustrious
town of Eleusis was then the field of an old man
named Celeus. He was carrying home a load of
acorns, and wild berries shaken down from the
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DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
brambles, and dry wood for burning on the
hearth ; his little daughter was leading two
goats home from the hills ; and at home there
was a little boy lying sick, in his cradle.
* Mother,' said the little girl — and the goddess
was moved at the name of mother — ' what do
you, all alone, in this solitary place ? ' The old
man stopped too, in spite of his heavy burden,
and bade her take shelter in his cottage, though
it was but a little one. But at first she refused to
come ; she looked like an old woman, and an old
woman's coif confined her hair ; and as the man
still urged her, she said to him, ' Heaven bless
you ; and may children always be yours ! My
daughter has been stolen from me. Alas ! how
much happier is your lot than mine ' ; and,
though weeping is impossible for the gods, as
she spoke, a bright drop, like a tear, fell into her
bosom. Soft-hearted, the little girl and the old
man weep together. And after that the good
man said, ' Arise ! despise not the shelter of my
little home ; so may the daughter whom you
seek be restored to you.' ' Lead me,' answered
the goddess ; ' you have found out the secret of
moving me ; * and she arose from the stone, and
followed the old man ; and as they went he told
her of the sick child at home — how he is restless
with pain, and cannot sleep. And she, before
entering the little cottage, gathered from the
untended earth the soothing and sleep-giving
poppy; and as she gathered it, it is said that she
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GREEK STUDIES
forgot her vow, and tasted of the seeds, and broke
her long fast, unaware. As she came through the
door, she saw the house full of trouble, for now
there was no more hope of life for the sick
boy. She saluted the mother, whose name was
Metaneira, and humbly kissed the lips of the child,
with her own lips ; then the paleness left its face,
and suddenly the parents see the strength return-
ing to its body ; so great is the force that comes
from the divine mouth. And the whole family
was full of joy — the mother and the father and
the little girl ; they were the whole house-
hold. " 1
Three profound ethical conceptions, three im-
pressive sacred figures, have now defined them-
selves for the Greek imagination, condensed from
all the traditions which have now been traced,
from the hymns of the poets, from the instinctive
and unformulated mysticism of primitive minds.
Demeter is become the divine sorrowing mother.
Kore, the goddess of summer, is become Per-
sephone, the goddess of death, still associated
with the forms and odours of flowers and fruit,
yet as one risen from the dead also, presenting
one side of her ambiguous nature to men's
gloomier fancies. Thirdly, there is the image of
Demeter enthroned, chastened by sorrow, and
somewhat advanced in age, blessing the earth, in
her joy at the return of Kore. The myth has
1 With this may be connected another passage of Ovid—
Metamorphoses^ v. 391-408.
136
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
now entered on the third phase ot its life, in
which it becomes the property of those more
elevated spirits, who, in the decline of the Greek
religion, pick and choose and modify, with
perfect freedom of mind, whatever in it may
seem adapted to minister to their culture. In
this way, the myths of the Greek religion
become parts of an ideal, visible embodiments of
the susceptibilities and intuitions of the nobler
kind of souls ; and it is to this latest phase
of mythological development that the highest
Greek sculpture allies itself. Its function is to
give visible aesthetic expression to the constituent
parts of that ideal. As poetry dealt chiefly with
the incidents of the story, so it is with the person-
ages of the story — with Demeter and Kore them-
selves— that sculpture has to do.
For the myth of Demeter, like the Greek
religion in general, had its unlovelier side,
grotesque, unhellenic, unglorified by art, illus-
trated well enough by the description Pausanias
gives us of his visit to the cave of the Black
Demeter at Phigalia. In his time the image
itself had vanished ; but he tells us enough about
it to enable us to realise its general characteristics,
monstrous as the special legend with which it
was connected, the black draperies, the horse's
head united to the woman's body, with the
carved reptiles creeping about it. If, with the
thought of this gloomy image of our mother the
earth, in our minds, we take up one of those coins
137
GREEK STUDIES
which bear the image of Kore or Demeter,^ we
shall better understand what the function of
sculpture really was, in elevating and refining the
religious conceptions of the Greeks. Looking
on the profile, for instance, on one of those coins
of Messene, which almost certainly represent
Demeter, and noting the crisp, chaste opening of
the lips, the minutely wrought earrings, and
the delicately touched ears of corn, — this trifling
object being justly regarded as, in its aesthetic
qualities, an epitome of art on a larger scale, — we
shall see how far the imagination of the Greeks
had travelled from what their Black Demeter
shows us had once been possible for them, and in
making the gods of their worship the objects
of a worthy companionship in their thoughts.
Certainly, the mind of the old workman who
struck that coin was, if we may trust the
testimony of his work, unclouded by impure or
gloomy shadows. The thought of Demeter is
impressed here, with all the purity and propor-
tion, the purged and dainty intelligence of the
human countenance. The mystery of it is indeed
absent, perhaps could hardly have been looked
for in so slight a thing, intended for no sacred
purpose, and tossed lightly from hand to hand.
But in his firm hold on the harmonies of the
human face, the designer of this tranquil head of
* On these small objects the mother and daughter are hard to
distinguish, the latter being recognisable only by a greater delicacy
in the features and the more evident stamp of youth
138
DExMETER AND PERSEPHONE
Demeter is on the one road to a command over
the secrets of all imaginative pathos and mystery;
though, in the perfect fairness and blitheness of
his work, he might seem almost not to have
known the incidents of her terrible story.
It is probable that, at a later period than in
other equally important temples of Greece, the
earlier archaic representation of Demeter in the
sanctuary of Eleusis, was replaced by a more
beautiful image in the new style, with face
and hands of ivory, having therefore, in tone
and texture, some subtler likeness to women's
flesh, and the closely enveloping drapery being
constructed in daintily beaten plates of gold.
Praxiteles seems to have been the first to bring
into the region of a freer artistic handling these
shy deities of the earth, shrinking still within
the narrow restraints of a hieratic, conventional
treatment, long after the more genuine Olympians
had broken out of them. The school of
Praxiteles, as distinguished from that of Pheidias,
is especially the school of grace, relaxing a little
the severe ethical tension of the latter, in favour
of a slightly Asiatic sinuosity and tenderness.
Pausanias tells us that he carved the two
goddesses for the temple of Demeter at Athens ;
and Pliny speaks of two groups of his in brass,
the one representing the stealing of Persephone,
the other her later, annual descent into Hades,
conducted thither by the now pacified mother.
All alike have perished ; though perhaps some
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GREEK STUDIES
more or less faint reflexion of the most important
of these designs may still be traced on many
painted vases which depict the stealing of
Persephone, — a helpless, plucked flower in the
arms of Aidoneus. And in this almost traditional
form, the subject was often represented, in low
relief, on tombs, some of which still remain ; in
one or two instances, built up, oddly enough, in
the walls of Christian churches. On the tombs
of women who had died in early life, this was a
favourite subject, some likeness of the actual
lineaments of the deceased being sometimes
transferred to the features of Persephone.
Yet so far, it might seem, when we consider
the interest of this story in itself, and its im-
portance in the Greek religion, that no adequate
expression of it had remained to us in works of
art. But in the year 1857, the discovery of the
marbles, in the sacred precinct of Demeter at
Cnidus, restored to us an illustration of the myth
in its artistic phase, hardly less central than the
Homeric hymn in its poetical phase. With the
help of the descriptions and plans of Mr.
Newton's book,^ we can form, as one always
wishes to do in such cases, a clear idea of the
place where these marbles — three statues of the
best style of Greek sculpture, now in the British
Museum — were found. Occupying a ledge of
rock, looking towards the sea, at the base of a
1 A Hiitery of Discoveries at Halicamassus^ Cnidus^ and
Branchida,
140
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
cliff of upheaved limestone, of singular steepness
and regularity of surface, the spot presents indi-
cations of volcanic disturbance, as if a chasm
in the earth had opened here. It was this
character, suggesting the belief in an actual con-
nexion with the interior of the earth (local
tradition claiming it as the scene of the stealing
of Persephone), which probably gave rise, as in
other cases where the landscape presented some
peculiar feature in harmony with the story, to
the dedication upon it of a house and an image
of Demeter, with whom were associated Kore
and " the gods with Demeter " — oi deo\ irapa
Aafidrpi — Aidoneus, and the mystical or Chthonian
Dionysus. The house seems to have been a
small chapel only, of simple construction, and
designed for private use, the site itself having
been private property, consecrated by a particular
family, for their own religious uses, although
other persons, servants or dependents of the
founders, may also have frequented it. The
architecture seems to have been insignificant, but
the sculpture costly and exquisite, belonging, if
contemporary with the erection of the building,
to a great period of Greek art, of which also it is
judged to possess intrinsic marks — about the year
350 before Christ, the probable date of the
dedication of the little temple. The artists by
whom these works were produced were, there-
fore, either the contemporaries of Praxiteles,
whose Venus was for many centuries the glory of
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GREEK STUDIES
Cnidus, or belonged to the generation im-
mediately succeeding him. The temple itself
was probably thrown down by a renewal of the
volcanic disturbances ; the statues however
remaining, and the ministers and worshippers
still continuing to make shift for their sacred
business in the place, now doubly venerable, but
with its temple unrestored, down to the second
or third century of the Christian era, its fre-
quenters being now perhaps mere chance comers,
the family of the original donors having become
extinct, or having deserted it. Into this later
arrangement, clearly divined by Mr. Newton,
through those faint indications which mean
much for true experts, the extant remains, as
they were found upon the spot, permit us to
enter. It is one of the graves of that old religion,
but with much still fresh in it. We see it with
its provincial superstitions, and its curious magic
rites, but also with its means of really solemn
impressions, in the culminating forms of Greek
art ; the two faces of the Greek religion con-
fronting each other here, and the whole having
that rare peculiarity of a kind of personal stamp
upon it, the place having been designed to meet
the fancies of one particular soul, or at least of
one family. It is always difficult to bring the
every-day aspect of Greek religion home to us ;
but even the slighter details of this little
sanctuary help us to do this ; and knowing so
little, as we do, of the greater mysteries of
142
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
Demeter, this glance into an actual religious
place dedicated to her, and with the air of her
worship still about it, is doubly interesting. The
little votive figures of the goddesses, in baked
earth, were still lying stored in the small treasury
intended for such objects, or scattered about the
feet of the images, together with lamps in great
number, a lighted lamp being a favourite offering,
in memory of the torches with which Demeter
sought Persephone, or from some sense of
inherent darkness in these gods of the earth ;
those torches in the hands of Demeter being
indeed originally the artificial warmth and
brightness of lamp and fire, on winter nights.
The dira or spells, — KardSeafMOL — binding or
devoting certain persons to the infernal gods,
inscribed on thin rolls of lead, with holes, some-
times, for hanging them up about those quiet
statues, still lay, just as they were left, anywhere
within the sacred precinct, illustrating at once
the gloomier side of the Greek religion in general,
and of Demeter and Persephone especially, in
their character of avenging deities, and as relics
of ancient magic, reproduced so strangely at
other times and places, reminding us of the per-
manence of certain odd ways of human thought.
A woman binds with her spell the person who
seduces her husband away from her and her
children ; another, the person who has accused her
of preparing poison for her husband ; another
devotes one who has not restored a borrowed
143
GREEK STUDIES
garment, or has stolen a bracelet, or certain
drinking-horns ; and, from some instances, we
might infer that this was a favourite place of
worship for the poor and ignorant. In this
living picture, we find still lingering on, at the
foot of the beautiful Greek marbles, that phase
of religious temper which a cynical mind might
think a truer link of its unity and permanence
than any higher aesthetic instincts — a phase of it,
which the art of sculpture, humanising and
refining man*s conceptions of the unseen, tended
constantly to do away. For the higher side of
the Greek religion, thus humanised and refined
by art, and elevated by it to the sense of beauty,
is here also.
There were three ideal forms, as we saw,
gradually shaping themselves in the development
of the story of Demeter, waiting only for complete
realisation at the hands of the sculptor ; and
now, with these forms in our minds, let us place
ourselves in thought before the three images
which once probably occupied the three niches
or ambries in the face of that singular cliff at
Cnidus, one of them being then wrought on a
larger scale. Of the three figures, one prob-
ably represents Persephone, as the goddess of
the dead ; the second, Demeter enthroned ; the
third is probably a portrait-statue of a priestess of
Demeter, but may perhaps, even so, represent
Demeter herself, Demeter Achcea^ Ceres Deserta,
the mater dolorosa of the Greeks, a type not as yet
144
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
recognised in any other work of ancient art.
Certainly, it seems hard not to believe that this
work is in some way connected with the legend
of the place to which it belonged, and the main
subject of which it realises so completely ; and,
at least, it shows how the higher Greek sculpture
would have worked out this motive. If Demeter
at all, it is Demeter the seeker, — At;^, — as she
was called in the mysteries, in some pause of her
restless wandering over the world in search of the
lost child, and become at last an abstract type of
the wanderer. The Homeric hymn, as we saw,
had its sculptural motives, the great gestures of
Demeter, who was ever the stately goddess, as
she followed the daughters of Celeus, or sat by
the well-side, or went out and in, through the
halls of the palace, expressed in monumental
words. With the sentiment of that monumental
Homeric presence this statue is penetrated, unit-
ing a certain solemnity of attitude and bearing,
to a profound piteousness, an unrivalled pathos of
expression. There is something of the pity of
Michelangelo's mater dolorosa^ in the wasted form
and marred countenance, yet with the light
breaking faintly over it from the eyes, which,
contrary to the usual practice in ancient sculpture,
are represented as looking upwards. It is the
aged woman who has escaped from pirates, who
has but just escaped being sold as a slave, calling
on the young for pity. The sorrows of her long
wanderings seem to have passed into the marble ;
L 145
GREEK STUDIES
and in this too, it meets the demands which the
reader of the Homeric hymn, with its command
over the resources of human pathos, makes upon
the sculptor. The tall figure, in proportion
above the ordinary height, is veiled, and clad to
the feet in the longer tunic, its numerous folds
hanging in heavy parallel lines, opposing the
lines of the peplus, or cloak, which cross it
diagonally over the breast, enwrapping the upper
portion of the body somewhat closely. It is the
very type of the wandering woman, going grandly,
indeed, as Homer describes her, yet so human in
her anguish, that we seem to recognise some far
descended shadow of her, in the homely figure of
the roughly clad French peasant woman, who, in
one of Corot's pictures, is hasting along under a
sad light, as the day goes out behind the little
hill. We have watched the growth of the
merely personal sentiment in the story ; and we
may notice that, if this figure be indeed Demeter,
then the conception of her has become wholly
humanised ; no trace of the primitive cosmical
import of the myth, no colour or scent of the
mystical earth, remains about it.
The seated figure, much mutilated, and worn
by long exposure, yet possessing, according to
the best critics, marks of the school of Praxiteles,
is almost undoubtedly the image of Demeter
enthroned. Three times in the Homeric hymn
she is represented as sitting, once by the fountain
at the wayside, again in the house of Celeus, and
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DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
again in the newly finished temple of Eleusis ;
but always in sorrow ; seated on the -rrerpa
arfika<rr(y;, which, as Ovid told us, the people of
Attica still called the stone of sorrow. Here she
is represented in her later state of reconciliation,
enthroned as the glorified mother of all things.
The delicate plaiting of the tunic about the
throat, the formal curling of the hair, and a
certain weight of over-thoughtfulness in the
brows, recall the manner of Leonardo da Vinci,
a master, one of whose characteristics is a very
sensitive expression of the sentiment of maternity.
It reminds one especially of a work by one of his
scholars, the Virgin of the Balances, in the Louvre,
a picture which has been thought to represent,
under a veil, the blessing of universal nature,
and in which the sleepy-looking heads, with
a peculiar grace and refinement of somewhat
advanced life in them, have just this half-weary
posture. We see here, then, the Here of the
world below, the Stygian Juno, the chief of
those Elysian matrons who come crowding, in
the poem of Claudian, to the marriage toilet of
Proserpine, the goddess of the fertility of the
earth and of all creatures, but still of fertility as
arisen out of death ; ^ and therefore she is not
without a certain pensiveness, having seen the
seed fall into the ground and die, many times.
Persephone is returned to her, and the hair
1 Pallere ligustra,
Eispirare rosas, decrescere lilia vidi.
GREEK STUDIES
spreads, like a rich harvest, over her shoulders ;
but she is still veiled, and knov^rs that the seed
must fall into the ground again, and Persephone
descend again from her.
The statues of the supposed priestess, and of
the enthroned Demeter, are of more than the
size of life ; the figure of Persephone is but
seventeen inches high, a daintily handled toy of
Parian marble, the miniature copy perhaps of a
much larger work, vv^hich might well be repro-
duced on a magnified scale. The conception
of Demeter is throughout chiefly human, and
even domestic, though never without a hieratic
interest, because she is not a goddess only, but
also a priestess. In contrast, Persephone is
wholly unearthly, the close companion, and even
the confused double, of Hecate, the goddess of
midnight terrors, — Despcena^ — the final mistress
of all that lives ; and as sorrow is the character-
istic sentiment of Demeter, so awe of Persephone.
She is compact of sleep, and death, and flowers,
but of narcotic flowers especially, — a revenanty
who in the garden of Aidoneus has eaten of the
pomegranate, and bears always the secret of
decay in her, of return to the grave, in the
mystery of those swallowed seeds ; sometimes,
in later work, holding in her hand the key of
the great prison-house, but which unlocks all
secrets also ; (there, finally, or through oracles
revealed in dreams ;) sometimes, like Demeter,
the poppy, emblem of sleep and death by its
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DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
narcotic juices, of life and resurrection by its
innumerable seeds, of the dreams, therefore, that
may intervene between falling asleep and waking.
Treated as it is in the Homeric hymn, and still
more in this statue, the image of Persephone
may be regarded as the result of many efforts to
lift the old Chthonian gloom, still lingering on
in heavier souls, concerning the grave, to connect
it with impressions of dignity and beauty, and a
certain sweetness even ; it is meant to make
men in love, or at least at peace, with death.
The Persephone of Praxiteles' school, then,
is Aphrodite -Persephone^ Venus -Ltbitina. Her
shadowy eyes have gazed upon the fainter
colouring of the under-world, and the tranquillity,
born of it, has " passed into her face " ; for the
Greek Hades is, after all, but a quiet, twilight
place, not very different from that House of Fame
where Dante places the great souls of the
classical world ; Aidoneus himself being con-
ceived, in the highest Greek sculpture, as but a
gentler Zeus, the great innkeeper ; so that when
a certain Greek sculptor had failed in his por-
traiture of Zeus, because it had too little hilarity,
too little, in the eyes and brow, of the open and
cheerful sky, he only changed its title, and the
thing passed excellently, with its heavy locks
and shadowy eyebrows, for the god of the dead.
The image of Persephone, then, as it is here
composed, with the tall, tower-like head-dress,
from which the veil depends — the corn-basket,
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GREEK STUDIES
originally carried thus by the Greek women,
balanced on the head — giving the figure unusual
length, has the air of a body bound about with
grave-clothes ; while the archaic hands and feet,
and a certain stiffness in the folds of the drapery,
give it something of a hieratic character, and to
the modern observer may suggest a sort of kin-
ship with the more chastened kind of Gothic
work. But quite of the school of Praxiteles is
the general character of the composition ; the
graceful waving of the hair, the fine shadows of
the little face, of the eyes and lips especially,
like the shadows of a flower — a flower risen noise-
lessly from its dwelling in the dust — though still
with that fulness or heaviness in the brow, as of
sleepy people, which, in the delicate gradations
of Greek sculpture, distinguish the infernal deities
from their Olympian kindred. The object placed
in the hand may be, perhaps, a stiff, archaic flower,
but is probably the partly consumed pomegranate
— one morsel gone ; the most usual emblem of
Persephone being this mystical fruit, which,
because of the multitude of its seeds, was to the
Romans a symbol of fecundity, and was sold at
the doors of the temple of Ceres, that the women
might offer it there, and bear numerous children;
and so, to the middle age, became a symbol of
the fruitful earth itself ; and then of that other
seed sown in the dark under-world ; and at last
of that whole hidden region, so thickly sown,
which Dante visited, Michelino painting him,
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DEiMETER AND PERSEPHONE
in the Duomo of Florence, with this fruit in his
hand, and Botticelli putting it into the childish
hands of Him, who, if men " go down into hell,
is there also."
There is an attractiveness in these goddesses
of the earth, akin to the influence of cool places,
quiet houses, subdued light, tranquillising voices.
What is there in this phase of ancient religion
for us, at the present day ? The myth of Demeter
and Persephone, then, illustrates the power of
the Greek religion as a religion of pure ideas —
of conceptions, which having no link on historical
fact, yet, because they arose naturally out of the
spirit of man, and embodied, in adequate symbols,
his deepest thoughts concerning the conditions
of his physical and spiritual life, maintained their
hold through many changes, and are still not
without a solemnising power even for the modern
mind, which has once admitted them as recognised
and habitual inhabitants ; and, abiding thus for
the elevation and purifying of our sentiments,
long after the earlier and simpler races of their
worshippers have passed away, they may be a
pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once
legitimate and possible, of the associations, the
conceptions, the imagery, of Greek religious
poetry in general, of the poetry of all religions.
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
A STUDY FROM EURIPIDES
Centuries of zealous archaeology notwithstand-
ing, many phases of the so varied Greek genius
are recorded for the modern student in a kind of
shorthand only, or not at all. Even for Pausanias,
visiting Greece before its direct part in affairs
was quite played out, much had perished or
grown dim — of its art, of the truth of its
outward history, above all of its religion as a
credible or practicable thing. And yet Pausanias
visits Greece under conditions as favourable for
observation as those under which later travellers,
Addison or Eustace, proceed to Italy. For him
the impress of life in those old Greek cities is
not less vivid and entire than that of medieval
Italy to ourselves ; at Siena, for instance, with
its ancient palaces still in occupation, its public
edifices as serviceable as if the old republic had
but just now vacated them, the tradition of their
primitive worship still unbroken in its churches.
Had the opportunities in which Pausanias was
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
fortunate been ours, how many haunts of the
antique Greek life unnoticed by him we should
have peeped into, minutely systematic in our
painstaking ! how many a view would broaden
out where he notes hardly anything at all on his
map of Greece !
One of the most curious phases of Greek
civilisation which has thus perished for us, and
regarding which, as we may fancy, we should
have made better use of that old traveller's
facilities, is the early Attic deme-life — its pictur-
esque, intensely localised variety, in the hollow
or on the spur of mountain or sea-shore ; and
with it many a relic of primitive religion, many
an early growth of art parallel to what Vasari
records of artistic beginnings in the smaller cities
of Italy. Colonus and Acharnse, surviving still
so vividly by the magic of Sophocles, of Aristo-
phanes, are but isolated examples of a wide-
spread manner of life, in which, amid many
provincial peculiarities, the first, yet perhaps the
most costly and telling steps were made in all
the various departments of Greek culture. Even
in the days of Pausanias, Pirasus was still trace-
able as a distinct township, once the possible
rival of Athens, with its little old covered market
by the seaside, and the symbolical picture of the
place, its Genius, visible on the wall. And that
is but the type of what there had been to know
of threescore and more village communities, each
having its own altars, its special worship and
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GREEK STUDIES
place of civic assembly, its trade and crafts, its
name drawn from physical peculiarity or famous
incident, its body of heroic tradition. Lingering
on while Athens, the great deme, gradually
absorbed into itself more and more of their
achievements, and passing away almost com-
pletely as political factors in the Peloponnesian
war, they were still felt, we can hardly doubt,
in the actual physiognomy of Greece. That
variety in unity, v.'^hich its singular geographical
formation secured to Greece as a whole, was at
its utmost in these minute reflexions of the
national character, with all the relish of local
difference — new art, new poetry, fresh ventures
in political combination, in the conception of
life, springing as if straight from the soil, like
the thorn-blossom of early spring in magic lines
over all that rocky land. On the other hand, it
was just here that ancient habits clung most
tenaciously — that old-fashioned, homely, delight-
ful existence, to which the refugee, pent up in
Athens in the years of the Peloponnesian war,
looked back so fondly. If the impression of
Greece generally is but enhanced by the littleness
of the physical scene of events intellectually so
great — such a system of grand lines, restrained
within so narrow a compass^ as in one of its fine
coins — still more would this be true of those
centres of country life. Here, certainly, was
that assertion of seemingly small interests, which
brings into free play, and gives his utmost value
154
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
to, the individual ; making his warfare, equally
with his more peaceful rivalries, deme against
deme, the mountain against the plain, the sea-
shore, (as in our own old Border life, but played
out here by wonderfully gifted people) tangible
as a personal history, to the doubling of its
fascination for those whose business is with the
survey of the dramatic side of life.
As with civil matters, so it was also, we may
fairly suppose, with religion ; the demc-life was
a manifestation of religious custom and sentiment,
in all their primitive local variety. As Athens,
gradually drawing into itself the various elements
of provincial culture, developed, with authority,
the central religious position, the demes-men
did but add the worship of Athene Polias, the
goddess of the capital, to their own pre-existent
ritual uses. Of local and central religion alike,
time and circumstance had obliterated much
when Pausanias came. A devout spirit, with
religion for his chief interest, eager for the trace
of a divine footstep, anxious even in the days of
Lucian to deal seriously with what had counted
for so much to serious men, he has, indeed, to
lament that " Pan is dead " : — *' They come no
longer ! " — " These things happen no longer ! "
But the Greek — his very name also, Hellen^ was
the title of a priesthood — had been religious
abundantly, sanctifying every detail of his actual
life with the religious idea ; and as Pausanias
goes on his way he finds many a remnant of that
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GREEK STUDIES
earlier estate of religion, when, as he fancied, it
had been nearer the gods, as it was certainly
nearer the earth. It is marked, even in decay,
with varieties of place ; and is not only continuous
but in situ. At Phigaleia he makes his offerings
to Demeter, agreeably to the paternal rites of the
inhabitants, wax, fruit, undressed wool " still full
of the sordes of the sheep." A dream from
heaven cuts short his notice of the mysteries of
Eleusis. He sees the stone, " big enough for a
little man," on which Silenus was used to sit and
rest ; at Athens, the tombs of the Amazons, of
the purple-haired Nisus, of Deucalion ; — " it is
a manifest token that he had dwelt there." The
worshippers of Poseidon, even at his temple
among the hills, might still feel the earth
fluctuating beneath their feet. And in care for
divine things, he tells us, the Athenians outdid
all other Greeks. Even in the days of Nero it
revealed itself oddly ; and it is natural to suppose
that of this temper the demes, as the proper
home of conservatism, were exceptionally express-
ive. Scattered in those remote, romantic villages,
among their olives or sea-weeds, lay the heroic
graves, the relics, the sacred images, often rude
enough amid the delicate tribute of later art ;
this too oftentimes finding in such retirement its
best inspirations, as in some Attic Fiesole. Like
a network over the land of gracious poetic
tradition, as also of undisturbed ceremonial usage
surviving late for those who cared to seek it, the
156
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
local religions had been never wholly superseded
by the worship of the great national temples.
They were, in truth, the most characteristic
developments of a faith essentially earth-born or
indigenous.
And how often must the student of fine art,
again, wish he had the same sort of knowledge
about its earlier growth in Greece, that he
actually possesses in the case of Italian art !
Given any development at all in this matter,
there must have been phases of art, which, if
immature, were also veritable expressions of
power to come, intermediate discoveries of beauty,
such as are by no means a mere anticipation,
and of service only as explaining historically
larger subsequent achievements, but of permanent
attractiveness in themselves, being often, indeed,
the true maturity of certain amiable artistic
qualities. And in regard to Greek art at its
best — the Parthenon — no less than to the art
of the Renaissance at its best — the Sistine Chapel
— the more instructive light would be derived
rather from what precedes than what follows
such central success, from the determination to
apprehend the fulfilment of past effort rather
than the eve of decline, in the critical, central
moment which partakes of both. Of such early
promise, early achievement, we have in the case
of Greek art little to compare with what is
extant of the youth of the arts in Italy. Over-
beck's careful gleanings of its history form indeed
157
GREEK STUDIES
a sorry relic as contrasted with Vasari's intima-
tions of the beginnings of the Renaissance.
Fired by certain fragments of its earlier days, of
a beauty, in truth, absolute, and vainly longing
for more, the student of Greek sculpture indulges
the thought of an ideal of youthful energy
therein, yet withal of youthful self-restraint ;
and again, as with survivals of old religion, the
privileged home, he fancies, of that ideal must
have been in tho«;e venerable Attic townships,
as to a large extent it passed away with them.
The budding of new art, the survival of
old religion, at isolated centres of provincial
life, where varieties of human character also
were keen, abundant, asserted in correspondingly
effective incident — this is what irresistible fancy
superinduces on historic details, themselves
meagre enough. The sentiment of antiquity
is indeed a characteristic of all cultivated people,
even in what may seem the freshest ages, and
not exclusively a humour of our later world.
In the earliest notices about them, as we know,
the people of Attica appear already impressed
by the immense antiquity of their occupation
of its soil, of which they claim to be the very
first flower. Some at least of those old demes-
men we may well fancy sentimentally reluctant
to change their habits, fearful of losing too
much of themselves in the larger stream of life,
clinging to what is antiquated as the work of
centralisation goes on, needful as that work was,
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
with the great *' Eastern difficulty " already ever
in the distance. The fear of Asia, barbaric,
splendid, hardly known, yet haunting the curious
imagination of those who had borrowed thence
the art in which they were rapidly excelling it,
developing, as we now see, in the interest of
Greek humanity, crafts begotten of tyrannic
and illiberal luxury, was finally to suppress the
rivalries of those primitive centres of activity,
when the " invincible armada " of the common
foe came into sight.
At a later period civil strife was to destroy their
last traces. The old hoplite, from Rhamnus or
Acharnze, pent up in beleaguered Athens during
that first summer of the Peloponnesian war,
occupying with his household a turret of the
wall, as Thucydides describes — one of many
picturesque touches in that severe historian —
could well remember the ancient provincial life
which this conflict with Sparta was bringing to
an end. He could recall his boyish, half-scared
curiosity concerning those Persian ships, coming
first as merchantmen, or with pirates on occa-
sion, in the half-savage, wicked splendours of
their decoration, the monstrous figure-heads, their
glittering freightage. Men would hardly have
trusted their women or children with that sus-
picious crew, hovering through the dusk. There
were soothsayers, indeed, who had long foretold
what happened soon after, giving shape to vague,
supernatural terrors. And then he had crept
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GREEK STUDIES
from his hiding-place with other lads to go view
the enemies' slain at Marathon, beside those
belated Spartans, this new war with whom seemed
to be reviving the fierce local feuds of his younger
days. Paraloi and Diacrioi had ever been rivals.
Very distant it all seemed now, with all the
stories he could tell ; for in those crumbling
little towns, as heroic life had lingered on into
the actual, so, at an earlier date, the supernatural
into the heroic. Like mist at dawn, the last
traces of its divine visitors had then vanished
from the land, where, however, they had already
begotten " our best and oldest families."
It was Theseus, uncompromising young master
of the situation, in fearless application of " the
modern spirit " of his day to every phase of life
where it was applicable, who, at the expense of
Attica, had given Athens a people, reluctant
enough, in truth, as Plutarch suggests, to desert
" their homes and religious usages and many good
and gracious kings of their own " for this elect
youth, who thus figures, passably, as a kind of
mythic shorthand for civilisation, making roads
and the like, facilitating travel, suppressing
various forms of violence, but many innocent
things as well. So it must needs be in a world
where, even hand in hand with a god-assisted
hero. Justice goes blindfold. He slays the bull
of Marathon and many another local tyrant,
but also exterminates that delightful creature,
the Centaur. The Amazon, whom Plato will
i6o
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
reinstate as the type of improved womanhood,
has no better luck than Phasa, the sow-pig ot
Crommyon, foul old landed-proprietress. They
exerted, however, the prerogative of poetic pro-
test, and survive thereby. Centaur and Amazon,
as we see them in the fine art of Greece, re-
present the regret of Athenians themselves for
something that could never be brought to life
again, and have their pathos. Those young
heroes contending with Amazons on the frieze
of the Mausoleum had best make haste with
their bloody work, if young people's eyes can
tell a true story. A type still of progress
triumphant through injustice, set on improving
things off the face of the earth, Theseus took
occasion to attack the Amazons in their mountain
home, not long after their ruinous conflict with
Hercules, and hit them when they were down.
That greater bully had laboured off on the
world's highway, carrying with him the official
girdle of Antiope, their queen, gift of Ares, and
therewith, it would seem, the mystic secret of
their strength. At sight of this new foe, at any
rate, she came to a strange submission. The
savage virgin had turned to very woman, and
was presently a willing slave, returning on the
gaily appointed ship in all haste to Athens,
where in supposed wedlock she bore King
Theseus a son.
With their annual visit — visit to the Gar-
gareans ! — for the purpose of maintaining their
M i6i
GREEK STUDIES
species, parting with their boys early, these
husbandless women could hardly be supposed a
very happy, certainly not a very joyous people.
They figure rather as a sorry measure of the luck
of the female sex in taking a hard natural law into
their own hands, and by abnegation of all tender
companionship making shift with bare inde-
pendence, as a kind of second-best — the best
practicable by them in the imperfect actual con-
dition of things. But the heart-strings would
ache still where the breast had been cut away.
The sisters of Antiope had come, not immedi-
ately, but in careful array of battle, to bring back
the captive. All along the weary roads from
the Caucasus to Attica, their traces had remained
in the great graves of those who died by the way.
Against the little remnant, carrying on the fight
to the very midst of Athens, Antiope herself
had turned, all other thoughts transformed now
into wild idolatry of her hero. Superstitious, or
in real regret, the Athenians never forgot their
tombs. As for Antiope, the conscience of her
perfidy remained with her, adding the pang
of remorse to her own desertion, when King
Theseus, with his accustomed bad faith to women,
set her, too, aside in turn. Phaedra, the true
wife, was there, peeping suspiciously at her
arrival ; and even as Antiope yielded to her
lord's embraces the thought had come that a
male child might be the instrument of her anger,
and one day judge her cause.
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
In one of these doomed, decaying villages,
then. King Theseus placed the woman and her
babe, hidden, yet secure, within the Attic border,
as men veil their mistakes or crimes. They
might pass av^^ay, they and their story, together
with the memory of other antiquated creatures
of such places, who had had connubial dealings
with the stars. The white, paved waggon-track,
a by-path of the sacred way to Eleusis, zigzagged
through sloping olive-yards, from the plain of
silvered blue, with Athens building in the
distance, and passed the door of the rude stone
house, furnished scantily, which no one had
ventured to inhabit of late years till they came
there. On the ledges of the grey cliffs above,
the laurel groves, stem and foliage of motionless
bronze, had spread their tents. Travellers bound
northwards were glad to repose themselves there,
and take directions, or provision for their journey
onwards, from the highland people, who came
down hither to sell their honey, their cheese,
and woollen stuff, in the tiny market-place. At
dawn the great stars seemed to halt a while,
burning as if for sacrifice to some pure deity,
on those distant, obscurely named heights, like
broken swords, the rim of the world. A little
later you could just see the newly opened quarries,
like streaks of snow on their russet-brown bosoms.
Thither in spring-time all eyes turned from
Athens devoutly, intent till the first shaft of
lightning gave signal for the departure of the
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sacred ship to Delos. Racing over those rocky
surfaces, the virgin air descended hither with
the secret of profound sleep, as the child lay in
its cubicle hewn in the stone, the white fleeces
heaped warmly round him. In the wild Amazon's
soul, to her surprise, and at first against her will,
the maternal sense had quickened from the
moment of his conception, and (that burst of
angry tears with which she had received him
into the world once dried up), kindling more
eagerly at every token of manly growth, had at
length driven out every other feeling. And this
animal sentiment, educating the human hand
and heart in her, had become a moral one, when,
King Theseus leaving her in anger, visibly
unkind, the child had crept to her side, and
tracing with small fingers the wrinkled lines
of her woebegone brow, carved there as if by
a thousand years of sorrow, had sown between
himself and her the seed of an undying sympathy.
She was thus already on the watch for a host
of minute recognitions on his part, of the self-
sacrifice involved in her devotion to a career of
which she must needs drain out the sorrow,
careful that he might taste only the joy. So
far, amid their spare living, the child, as if
looking up to the warm broad wing of her love
above him, seemed replete with comfort. Yet
in his moments of childish sickness, the first
passing shadows upon the deep joy of her
motherhood, she teaches him betimes to soothe
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
or cheat pain — little bodily pains only, hitherto.
She ventures sadly to assure him of the harsh
necessities of life : " Courage, child ! Every
one must take his share of suffering. Shift not
thy body so vehemently. Pain, taken quietly, is
easier to bear."
Carefully inverting the habits of her own rude
childhood, she learned to spin the wools, white and
grey, to clothe and cover him pleasantly. The
spectacle of his unsuspicious happiness, though
at present a matter of purely physical conditions,
awoke a strange sense of poetry, a kind of artistic
sense in her, watching, as her own long-deferred
recreation in life, his delight in the little delicacies
she prepared to his liking — broiled kids' flesh,
the red wine, the mushrooms sought through
the early dew — his hunger and thirst so daintily
satisfied, as he sat at table, like the first-born of
King Theseus, with two wax-lights and a fire
at dawn or nightfall dancing to the prattle and
laughter, a bright child, never stupidly weary.
At times his very happiness would seem to her
like a menace of misfortune to come. Was
there not with herself the curse of that unsisterly
action ? and not far from him, the terrible danger
of the father's, the step-mother's jealousy, the
mockery of those half-brothers to come .? Ah !
how perilous for happiness the sensibilities
which make him so exquisitely happy now !
Before they started on their dreadful visit to the
Minotaur, says Plutarch, the women told their
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sons many tales and other things to encourage
them ; and, even as she had furnished the child
betimes with rules for the solace of bodily pain,
so now she would have brought her own sad
experience into service in precepts for the ejection
of its festering power out of any other trouble
that might visit him. Already those little dis-
appointments which are as the shadow beside
all conscious enjoyment, were no petty things
to her, but had for her their pathos, as children's
troubles will have, in spite of the longer chance
before them. They were as the first steps in a
long story of deferred hopes, or anticipations of
death itself and the end of them.
The gift of Ares gone, the mystic girdle she
would fain have transferred to the child, that
bloody god of storm and battle, hereditary
patron of her house, faded from her thoughts
together with the memory of her past life — the
more completely, because another familiar though
somewhat forbidding deity, accepting certainly
a cruel and forbidding worship, was already in
possession, and reigning in the new home when
she came thither. Only, thanks to some kindly
local influence (by grace, say, of its delicate air),
Artemis, this other god she had known in the
Scythian wilds, had put aside her fierce ways,
as she paused awhile on her heavenly course
among these ancient abodes of men, gliding
softly, mainly through their dreams, with abun-
dance of salutary touches. Full, in truth, of
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
grateful memory of some timely service at
human hands ! In these highland villages the
tradition of celestial visitants clung fondly, of
god or hero, belated or misled on long journeys,
yet pleased to be among the sons of men, as
their way led them up the steep, narrow,
crooked street, condescending to rest a little,
as one, under some sudden stress not clearly
ascertained, had done here, in this very house,
thereafter for ever sacred. The place and its
inhabitants, of course, had been something
bigger in the days of those old mythic hospitali-
ties, unless, indeed, divine persons took kindly
the will for the deed — very different, surely,
from the present condition of things, for there
was little here to detain a delicate traveller, even
in the abode of Antiope and her son, though it
had been the residence of a king.
Hard by stood the chapel of the goddess,
who had thus adorned the place with her
memories. The priests, indeed, were already
departed to Athens, carrying with them the
ancient image, the vehicle of her actual presence,
as the surest means of enriching the capital at
the expense of the country, where she must now
make poor shift of the occasional worshipper
on his way through these mountain passes. But
safely roofed beneath the sturdy tiles of grey
Hymettus marble, upon the walls of the little
square recess enclosing the deserted pedestal, a
series of crowded imageries, in the devout spirit
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of earlier days, were eloquent concerning her.
Here from scene to scene, touched with silver
among the wild and human creatures in dun
bronze, with the moon's disk around her head,
shrouded closely, the goddess of the chase still
glided mystically through all the varied incidents
of her story, in all the detail of a written book.
A book for the delighted reading of a scholar,
willing to ponder at leisure, to make his way
surely, and understand. Very different, certainly,
from the cruel -featured little idol his mother
had brought in her bundle — the old Scythian
Artemis, hanging there on the wall, side by side
with the forgotten Ares, blood-red, — the goddess
reveals herself to the lad, poring through the
dusk by taper-light, as at once a virgin, neces-
sarily therefore the creature of solitude, yet also
as the assiduous nurse of children, and patroness
of the young. Her friendly intervention at the
act of birth everywhere, her claim upon the
nursling, among tame and wild creatures equally,
among men as among gods, nay ! among the
stars (upon the very star of dawn), gave her a
breadth of influence seemingly coextensive with
the sum of things. Yes ! his great mother was
in touch with everything. Yet throughout he
can but note her perpetual chastity, with pleas-
urable though half- suspicious wonder at the
mystery, he knows not what, involved therein,
as though he awoke suddenly in some distant,
unexplored region of her person and activity.
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
VVhv the lighted torch always, and that long
straight vesture rolled round so formally ? Was
it only against the cold of these northern
heights ?
To her, nevertheless, her maternity, her
solitude, to this virgin mother, who, with no
husband, no lover, no fruit of her own, is so
tender to the children of others, in a full heart
he devotes himself — his immaculate body and
soul. Dedicating himself thus, he has the sense
also that he becomes more entirely than ever
the chevalier of his mortal mother, of her sad
cause. The devout, diligent hands clear away
carefully the dust, the faded relics of her former
worship ; a worship renewed once more as the
sacred spring, set free from encumbrance, in
answer to his willing ministries murmurs again
under the dim vault in its marble basin, work
of primitive Titanic fingers — flows out through
its rocky channel, filling the whole township
with chaste thoughts of her.
Through much labour at length he comes to
the veritable story of her birth, like a gift direct
from the goddess herself to this loyal soul.
There were those in later times who, like
iEschylus, knew Artemis as the daughter not of
Leto but of Demeter, according to the version
of her history now conveyed to the young
Hippolytus, together with some deepened insight
into her character. The goddess of Eleusis, on
a journey, in the old days when, as Plato says,
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men lived nearer the gods, finding herself with
child by some starry inmate of those high places,
had lain down in the rock-hewn cubicle of the
inner chamber, and, certainly in sorrow, brought
forth a daughter. Here was the secret at once
of the genial, all-embracing maternity of this
new strange Artemis, and of those more dubious
tokens, the lighted torch, the winding-sheet, the
arrow of death on the string — of sudden death,
truly, which may be thought after all the
kindest, as prevenient of all disgraceful sickness
or waste in the unsullied limbs. For the late
birth into the world of this so shadowy daughter
was somehow identified with the sudden passing
into Hades of her first-born, Persephone. As
he scans those scenes anew, an awful surmise
comes to him ; his divine patroness moves there
as death, surely. Still, however, gratefully
putting away suspicion, he seized even in these
ambiguous imageries their happier suggestions,
satisfied in thinking of his new mother as but
the giver of sound sleep, of the benign night,
whence — mystery of mysteries ! — good things
are born softly, from which he awakes betimes
for his healthful service to her. Either way,
sister of Apollo or sister of Persephone, to him
she should be a power of sanity, sweet as the
flowers he offered her gathered at dawn, setting
daily their purple and white frost against her
ancient marbles. There was more certainly
than the first breath of day in them. Was there
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
here something ot" her person, her sensible
presence, by way of direct response to him in
his early devotion, astir for her sake before the
very birds, nesting here so freely, the quail
above all, in some privileged connexion with
her story still unfathomed by the learned youth ?
Amid them he too found a voice, and sang
articulately the praises of the great goddess.
Those more dubious traits, nevertheless, so
lightly disposed of by Hippolytus (Hecate thus
counting for him as Artemis goddess of health),
became to his mother, in the light of her sad
experience, the sum of the whole matter. While
he drew only peaceful inducements to sleep
from that two-sided figure, she reads there a
volume of sinister intentions, and liked little this
seemingly dead goddess, who could but move
among the living banefully, stealing with her
night-shade into the day where she had no proper
right. The gods had ever had much to do with
the shaping of her fortunes and the fortunes of
her kindred ; and the mortal mother felt nothing
less than jealousy from the hour when the lad had
first delightedly called her to share his discoveries,
and learn the true story (if it were not rather the
malicious counterfeit) of the new divine mother
to whom he has thus absolutely entrusted him-
self. Was not this absolute chastity itself a kind
of death ? She, too, in secret makes her gruesome
midnight offering with averted eyes. She dreams
one night he is in danger ; creeps to his cubicle
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to see ; the face is covered, as he lies, against the
cold. She traces the motionless outline, raises the
coverlet ; with the nice black head deep in the
fleecy pillow he is sleeping quietly, he dreams of
that other mother gliding in upon the moonbeam,
and awaking turns sympathetically upon the living
woman, is subdued in a moment to the expression
of her troubled spirit, and understands.
And when the child departed from her for
the first time, springing from his white bed
before the dawn, to accompany the elders on
their annual visit to the Eleusinian goddess, the
after-sense of his wonderful happiness, tranquillis-
ing her in spite of herself by its genial power
over the actual moment, stirred nevertheless a
new sort of anxiety for the future. Her work
in life henceforward was defined as a ministry to
so precious a gift, in full consciousness of its risk ;
it became her religion, the centre of her pieties.
She missed painfully his continual singing hover-
ing about the place, like the earth itself made
audible in all its humanities. Half-selfish for a
moment, she prays that he may remain for ever
a child, to her solace ; welcomes now the promise
of his chastity (though chastity were itself a kind
of death) as the pledge of his abiding always
with her. And these thoughts were but infixed
more deeply by the sudden stroke of joy at his
return home in ceremonial trim and grown more
manly, with much increase of self-confidence in
that brief absence among his fellows.
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For, from the first, the unwelcome child, the
outcast, had been successful, with that special
good fortune which sometimes attends the out-
cast. His happiness, his invincible happiness,
had been found engaging, perhaps by the gods,
certainly by men ; and when King Theseus came
to take note how things went in that rough life
he had assigned them, he felt a half liking for
the boy, and bade him come down to Athens and
see the sights, partly by way of proof to his
already somewhat exacting wife of the difference
between the old love and the new as measured
by the present condition of their respective off-
spring. The fine nature, fastidious by instinct,
but bred with frugality enough to find the charm
of continual surprise in that delicate new Athens,
draws, as he goes, the full savour of its novelties ;
the marbles, the space and finish, the busy gaiety
of its streets, the elegance of life there, contrasting
with while it adds some mysterious endearment
to the thought of his own rude home. Without
envy, in hope only one day to share, to win them
by kindness, he gazes on the motley garden-plots,
the soft bedding, the showy toys, the delicate
keep of the children of Phsedra, who turn curiously
to their half-brother, venture to touch his long
strange gown of homespun grey, like the soft coat
of some wild creature who might let one stroke
it. Close to their dainty existence for a while,
he regards it as from afar ; looks forward all day
to the lights, the prattle, the laughter, the white
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bread, like sweet cake to him, of their ordinary
evening meal ; returns again and again, in spite
of himself, to watch, to admire, feeling a power
within him to merit the like ; finds his way back
at last, still light of heart, to his own poor fare,
able to do without what he would enjoy so much.
As, grateful for his scanty part in things — for
the make-believe of a feast in the little white
loaves she too has managed to come by, sipping
the thin white wine, he touches her dearly, the
mother is shocked with a sense of something
unearthly in his contentment, while he comes
and goes, singing now more abundantly than ever
a new canticle to her divine rival. Were things,
after all, to go grudgingly with him ? Sensible
of that curse on herself, with her suspicions of
his kinsfolk, of this dubious goddess to whom he
has devoted himself, she anticipates with more
foreboding than ever his path to be, with or
without a wife — her own solitude, or his — the
painful heats and cold. She fears even these late
successes ; it were best to veil their heads. The
strong as such had ever been against her and hers.
The father came again ; noted the boy's growth.
Manliest of men, like Hercules in his cloak of
lion's skin, he has after all but scant liking, feels,
through a certain meanness of soul, scorn for
the finer likeness of himself. Might this creature
of an already vanishing world, who for all his
hard rearing had a manifest dfstinction of
character, one day become his rival, full of
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loyalty as he was already to the deserted
mother ?
To charming Athens, nevertheless, he crept
back, as occasion served, to gaze peacefully on
the delightful good fortune of others, waiting for
the opportunity to take his own turn with the
rest, driving down thither at last in a chariot
gallantly, when all the town was assembled to
celebrate the king's birthday. For the goddess,
herself turning ever kinder, and figuring more
and more exclusively as the tender nurse of all
things, had transformed her young votary from
a hunter into a charioteer, a rearer and driver of
horses, after the fashion of his Amazon mothers
before him. Thereupon, all the lad's wholesome
vanity had centered on the fancy of the world-
famous games then lately established, as, smiling
down his mother's terrors, and grateful to his
celestial mother for many a hair-breadth escape,
he practised day by day, fed the animals, drove
them out, amused though companionless, visited
them affectionately in the deserted stone stables
of the ancient king. A chariot and horses, as
being the showiest outward thing the world
afforded, was like the pawn he moved to represent
the big demand he meant to make, honestly,
generously, on the ample fortunes of life. There
was something of his old miraculous kindred,
alien from this busy new world he came to,
about the boyish driver with the fame of a
scholar, in his grey fleecy cloak and hood of soft
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white woollen stuff, as he drove in that morning.
Men seemed to have seen a star flashing, and
crowded round to examine the little mountain-
bred beasts, in loud, friendly intercourse with the
hero of the hour — even those usually somewhat
unsympathetic half-brothers now full of enthusi-
asm for the outcast and his good fight for
prosperity. Instinctively people admired his
wonderful placidity, and would fain have shared
its secret, as it were the carelessness of some fair
flower upon his face. A victor in the day's race,
he carried home as his prize a glittering new
harness in place of the very old one he had come
with. " My chariot and horses ! " he says now,
with his single touch of pride. Yet at home,
savouring to the full his old solitary happiness,
veiled again from time to time in that ancient
life, he is still the student, still ponders the old
writings which tell of his divine patroness. At
Athens strange stories are told in turn of him, his
nights upon the mountains, his dreamy sin, with
that hypocritical virgin goddess, stories which
set the jealous suspicions of Theseus at rest once
more. For so " dream " not those who have
the tangible, appraisable world in view. Even
Queen Phaedra looks with pleasure, as he comes,
on the once despised illegitimate creature, at
home now here too, singing always audaciously,
so visibly happy, occupied, popular.
Encompassed by the luxuries of Athens, far
from those peaceful mountain places, among people
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
further still in spirit from their peaceful light
and shade, he did not forget the kindly goddess,
still sharing with his earthly mother the prizes,
or what they would buy, for the adornment of
their spare abode. The tombs of the fallen
Amazons, the spot where they had breathed
their last, he piously visited, informed himself
of every circumstance of the event with devout
care, and, thinking on them amid the dainties
of the royal table, boldly brought them too
their share of the offerings to the heroic dead.
Aphrodite, indeed — Aphrodite, of whom he had
scarcely so much as heard — was just then the
best-served deity in Athens, with all its new
wealth of colour and form, its gold and ivory,
the acting, the music, the fantastic women,
beneath the shadow of the great walls still rising
steadily. Hippolytus would have no part in her
worship ; instead did what was in him to revive
the neglected service of his own goddess, stirring
an old jealousy. For Aphrodite too had looked
with delight upon the youth, already the centre
of a hundred less dangerous human rivalries
among the maidens of Greece, and was by no
means indifferent to his indifference, his instinc-
tive distaste ; while the sterner, almost forgotten
Artemis found once more her great moon-shaped
cake, set about with starry tapers, at the appointed
seasons.
They know him now from afar, by his
emphatic, shooting, arrowy movements ; and on
N 177
GREEK STUDIES
the day of the great chariot races " he goes in
and wins." To the surprise of all he com-
pounded his handsome prize for the old wooden
image taken from the chapel at home, lurking
now in an obscure shrine in the meanest quarter
of the town. Sober amid the noisy feasting
which followed, unashamed, but travelling by
night to hide it from their mockery, warm at
his bosom, he reached the passes at twilight, and
through the deep peace of the glens bore it to
the old resting-place, now more worthy than
ever of the presence of its mistress, his mother
and all the people of the village coming forth
to salute her, all doors set mystically open, as
she advances.
Phasdra too, his step-mother, a fiery soul with
wild strange blood in her veins, forgetting her
fears of this illegitimate rival of her children,
seemed now to have seen him for the first time,
loved at last the very touch of his fleecy cloak,
and would fain have had him of her own
religion. As though the once neglected child
had been another, she tries to win him as a
stranger in his manly perfection, growing more
than an affectionate mother to her husband's
son. But why thus intimate and congenial, she
asks, always in the wrong quarter ? Why not
compass two ends at once ? Why so squeamishly
neglect the powerful, any power at all, in a city
so full of religion ? He might find the image
of her sprightly goddess everywhere, to his
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
liking, gold, silver, native or stranger, new or
old, graceful, or indeed, if he preferred it so, in
iron or stone. By the way, she explains the
delights of love, of marriage, the husband once
out of the v^ay ; finds in him, with misgiving,
a sort of forwardness, as she thinks, on this one
matter, as if he understood her craft and despised
it. He met her questions in truth with scarce
so much as contempt, with laughing counter-
queries, why people needed wedding at all ?
They might have found the children in the
temples, or bought them, as you could buy
flowers in Athens.
Meantime Phaedra's young children draw
from the seemingly unconscious finger the
marriage-ring, set it spinning on the floor at his
feet, and the staid youth places it for a moment
on his own finger for safety. As it settles there,
his step-mother, aware all the while, suddenly
presses his hand over it. He found the ring
there that night as he lay ; left his bed in the
darkness, and again, for safety, put it on the
finger of the image, wedding once for all that
so kindly mystical mother. And still, even
amid his earthly mother's terrible misgivings,
he seems to foresee a charming career marked
out before him in friendly Athens, to the height
of his desire. Grateful that he is here at all,
sharing at last so freely life's banquet, he puts
himself for a moment in his old place, recalling
his old enjoyment of the pleasure of others ;
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feels, just then, no different. Yet never had
life seemed so sufficing as at this moment — the
meat, the drink, the drives, the popularity as he
comes and goes, even his step-mother's false,
selfish, ostentatious gifts. But she, too, begins
to feel something of the jealousy of that other
divine, would-be mistress, and by way of a last
effort to bring him to a better mind in regard to
them both, conducts him (immeasurable privi-
lege ! ) to her own private chapel.
You could hardly tell where the apartments
of the adulteress ended and that of the divine
courtesan began. Haunts of her long, indolent,
self- pleasing nights and days, they presented
everywhere the impress of Phaedra's luxurious
humour. A peculiar glow, such as he had never
before seen, like heady lamplight, or sunshine to
some sleeper in a delirious dream, hung upon,
clung to, the bold, naked, shameful imageries,
as his step-mother trimmed the lamps, drew
forth her sickly perfumes, clad afresh in piquant
change of raiment the almost formless goddess
crouching there in her unclean shrine or stye,
set at last her foolish wheel in motion to a low
chant, holding him by the wrist, keeping close
all the while, as if to catch some germ of consent
in his indifferent words.
And little by little he perceives that all this
is for him — the incense, the dizzy wheel, the
shreds of stuff cut secretly from his sleeve, the
sweetened cup he drank at her offer, unavail-
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
ingly ; and yes ! his own features surely, in
pallid wax. With a gasp of flighty laughter she
ventures to point the thing out to him, full as
he is at last of visible, irrepressible dislike. Ah !
it was that very reluctance that chiefly stirred
her. Healthily white and red, he had a marvel-
lous air of discretion about him, as of one never
to be caught unaware, as if he never could be
anything but like water from the rock, or the
wild flowers of the morning, or the beams of
the morning star turned to human flesh. It was
the self-possession of this happy mind, the purity
of this virgin body, she would fain have per-
turbed, as a pledge to herself of her own gaudy
claim to supremacy. King Theseus, as she
knew, had had at least two earlier loves ; for
once she would be a first love ; felt at moments
that with this one passion once indulged, it
might be happiness thereafter to rernain chaste
for ever. And then, by accident, yet surely
reading indifference in his manner of accepting
her gifts, she is ready again for contemptuous,
open battle. Is he indeed but a child still, this
nursling of the forbidding Amazon, of that
Amazonian goddess — to be a child always .? or a
wily priest rather, skilfully circumventing her
sorceries, with mystic precautions of his own ?
In truth, there is something of the priestly
character in this impassible discretion, remind-
ing her of his alleged intimacy with the rival
goddess, and redoubling her curiosity, her fond-
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GREEK STUDIES
ness. Phaedra, love -sick, feverish, in bodily
sickness at last, raves of the cool w^oods, the
chase, the steeds of Hippolytus, her thoughts
running madly on what she fancies to be his
secret business ; with a storm of abject tears,
foreseeing in one moment of recoil the weary
tale of years to come, star-stricken as she de-
clares, she dared at last to confess her longing to
already half- suspicious attendants ; and, awake
one morning to find Hippolytus there kindly at
her bidding, drove him openly forth in a tempest
of insulting speech. There was a mordant there,
like the menace of misfortune to come, in which
the injured goddess also was invited to concur.
What words ! what terrible words ! following,
clinging to him, like acrid fire upon his bare
flesh, as he hasted from Phaedra's house, thrust
out at last, his vesture remaining in her hands.
The husband returning suddenly, she tells him
a false story of violence to her bed, and is
believed.
King Theseus, all his accumulated store of
suspicion and dislike turning now to active
hatred, flung away readily upon him, bewildered,
unheard, one of three precious curses (some
mystery of wasting sickness therein) with which
Poseidon had indulged him. It seemed sad that
one so young must call for justice, precariously,
upon the gods, the dead, the very walls !
Admiring youth dared hardly bid farewell to
their late comrade ; are generous, at most, in
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HIPPOLVTUS VEILED
stolen, sympathetic glances towards the tallen
star. At home, veiled once again in that
ancient twilight world, his mother, fearing
solely for what he may suffer by the departure
of that so brief prosperity, enlarged as it had
been, even so, by his grateful taking of it, is
reassured, delighted, happy once more at the
visible proof of his happiness, his invincible
happiness. Duly he returned to Athens, early
astir, for the last time, to restore the forfeited
gifts, drove back his gaily painted chariot to
leave there behind him, actually enjoying the
drive, going home on foot poorer than ever.
He takes again to his former modes of life, a
little less to the horses, a little more to the old
studies, the strange, secret history of his favourite
goddess, — wronged surely ! somehow, she too,
as powerless to help him ; till he lay sick at
last, battling one morning, unaware of his
mother's presence, with the feverish creations of
the brain ; the giddy, foolish wheel, the foolish
song, of Phaedra's chapel, spinning there with
his heart bound thereto. " The curses of my
progenitors are come upon me ! " he cries.
" And yet, why so .? guiltless as I am of evil."
His wholesome religion seeming to turn against
him now, the trees, the streams, the very rocks,
swoon into living creatures, swarming around
the goddess who has lost her grave quietness.
He finds solicitation, and recoils, in the wind, in
the sounds of the rain ; till at length delirium
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itself finds a note of returning health. The
feverish wood-ways of his fancy open unex-
pectedly upon wide currents of air, lulling him
to sleep ; and the conflict ending suddenly
altogether at its sharpest, he lay in the early
light motionless among the pillows, his mother
standing by, as she thought, to see him die. As
if for the last time, she presses on him the things
he had liked best in that eating and drinking she
had found so beautiful. The eyes, the eyelids
are big with sorrow ; and, as he understands
again, making an effort for her sake, the healthy
light returns into his ; a hand seizes hers grate-
fully, and a slow convalescence begins, the
happiest period in the wild mother's life.
When he longed for flowers for the goddess, she
went a toilsome journey to seek them, growing
close, after long neglect, wholesome and firm on
their tall stalks. The singing she had longed
for so despairingly hovers gaily once more
within the chapel and around the house.
At the crisis of that strange illness she had
supposed her long forebodings about to be realised
at last ; but upon his recovery feared no more,
assured herself that the curses of the father, the
step-mother, the concurrent ill-will of that angry
goddess, have done their utmost ; he will outlive
her ; a few years hence put her to a rest surely
welcome. Her misgivings, arising always out of
the actual spectacle of his profound happiness,
seemed at an end in this meek bliss, the more as
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HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
she observed that it was a shade less unconscious
than of old. And almost suddenly he found the
strength, the heart, in him, to try his fortune
again with the old chariot ; and those still
unsatisfied curses, in truth, going on either side
of him like living creatures unseen, legend tells
briefly how, a competitor for pity with Adonis,
and Icarus, and Hyacinth, and other doomed
creatures of immature radiance in all story to
come, he set forth joyously for the chariot-races,
not of Athens, but of Troezen, her rival. Once
more he wins the prize ; he says good-bye to
admiring friends anxious to entertain him, and
by night starts off homewards, as of old, like a
child, returning quickly through the solitude in
which he had never lacked company, and was
now to die. Through all the perils of darkness
he had guided the chariot safely along the curved
shore ; the dawn was come, and a little breeze
astir, as the grey level spaces parted delicately
into white and blue, when in a moment an
earthquake, or Poseidon the earth-shaker himself,
or angry Aphrodite awake from the deep betimes,
rent the tranquil surface ; a great wave leapt
suddenly into the placid distance of the Attic
shore, and was surging here to the very necks of
the plunging horses, a moment since enjoying so
pleasantly with him the caress of the morning
air, but now, wholly forgetful of their old
affectionate habit of obedience, dragging their
leader headlong over the rough pavements.
185
GREEK STUDIES
Evening and the dawn might seem to have met
on that hapless day through which they drew
him home entangled in the trappings of the
chariot that had been his ruin, till he lay at
length, grey and haggard, at the rest he had
longed for dimly amid the buffeting of those
murderous stones, his mother watching impass-
ibly, sunk at once into the condition she had so
long anticipated.
Later legend breaks a supernatural light over
that great desolation, and would fain relieve the
reader by introducing the kindly Asclepius, who
presently restores the youth to life, not, however,
in the old form or under familiar conditions.
To her, surely, counting the wounds, the dis-
figurements, telling over the pains which had
shot through that dear head now insensible to
her touch among the pillows under the harsh
broad daylight, that would have been no more
of a solace than if, according to the fancy of
Ovid, he flourished still, a little deity, but under
a new name and veiled now in old age, in the
haunted grove of Aricia, far from his old Attic
home, in a land which had never seen him as
he was.
1 86
THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK
SCULPTURE
I
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART
The extant remains of Greek sculpture, though
but a fragment of what the Greek sculptors
produced, are, both in number and in excellence,
in their fitness, therefore, to represent the whole
of which they were a part, quite out of proportion
to what has come down to us of Greek painting,
and all those minor crafts which, in the Greek
workshop, as at all periods when the arts have
been really vigorous, were closely connected with
the highest imaginative work. Greek painting
is represented to us only by its distant reflexion
on the walls of the buried houses of Pompeii,
and the designs of subordinate though exquisite
craftsmen on the vases. Of wrought metal,
partly through the inherent usefulness of its
material, tempting ignorant persons into whose
hands it may fall to re -fashion it, we have
comparatively little ; while, in consequence of
the perishableness of their material, nothing
187
GREEK STUDIES
remains of the curious wood -work, the carved
ivory, the embroidery and coloured stuffs, on
which the Greeks set much store — of that whole
system of refined artisanship, diffused, like a
general atmosphere of beauty and richness, around
the more exalted creations of Greek sculpture.
What we possess, then, of that highest Greek
sculpture is presented to us in a sort of threefold
isolation ; isolation, first of all, from the concomi-
tant arts — the frieze of the Parthenon without
the metal bridles on the horses, for which the
holes in the marble remain; isolation, secondly,
from the architectural group of which, with
most careful estimate of distance and point of
observation, that frieze, for instance, was designed
to be a part ; isolation, thirdly, from the clear
Greek skies, the poetical Greek life, in our
modern galleries. And if one here or there, in
looking at these things, bethinks himself of the
required substitution ; if he endeavours mentally
to throw them back into that proper atmosphere,
through which alone they can exercise over us
all the magic by which they charmed their
original spectators, the effort is not always a
successful one, within the grey walls of the
Louvre or the British Museum.
And the circumstance that Greek sculpture is
presented to us in such falsifying isolation from
the work of the weaver, the carpenter, and the
goldsmith, has encouraged a manner of regarding
it too little sensuous. Approaching it with full
i88
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
information concerning what may be called the
inner lite of the Greeks, their modes of thought
and sentiment amply recorded in the writings of
the Greek poets and philosophers, but with no
lively impressions of that mere craftsman's world
of which so little has remained, students of
antiquity have for the most part interpreted the
creations of Greek sculpture, rather as elements
in a sequence of abstract ideas, as embodiments,
in a sort of petrified language, of pure thoughts,
and as interesting mainly in connexion with the
development of Greek intellect, than as elements
of a sequence in the material order, as results of
a designed and skilful dealing of accomplished
fingers with precious forms of matter for the
delight of the eyes. Greek sculpture has come
to be regarded as the product of a peculiarly
limited art, dealing with a specially abstracted
range of subjects ; and the Greek sculptor as a
workman almost exclusively intellectual, having
only a sort of accidental connexion with the
material in which his thought was expressed.
He is fancied to have been disdainful of such
matters as the mere tone, the fibre or texture, of
his marble or cedar-wood, of that just perceptible
yellowness, for instance, in the ivory-like surface
of the Venus of Melos ; as being occupied only
with forms as abstract almost as the conceptions
of philosophy, and translateable it might be
supposed into any material — a habit of regarding
him still further encouraged by the modern
189
GREEK STUDIES
sculptor's usage of employing merely mechanical
labour in the actual working of the stone.
The works of the highest Greek sculpture are
indeed tntellectualised^ if we may say so, to the
utmost degree ; the human figures which they
present to us seem actually to conceive thoughts ;
in them, that profoundly reasonable spirit of
design which is traceable in Greek art, continu-
ously and increasingly, upwards from its simplest
products, the oil -vessel or the urn, reaches its
perfection. Yet, though the most abstract and
intellectualised of sensuous objects, they are still
sensuous and material, addressing themselves, in
the first instance, not to the purely reflective
faculty, but to the eye ; and a complete criticism
must have approached them from both sides —
from the side of the intelligence indeed, towards
which they rank as great thoughts come down
into the stone ; but from the sensuous side also,
towards which they rank as the most perfect
results of that pure skill of hand, of which the
Venus of Melos, we may say, is the highest
example, and the little polished pitcher or lamp,
also perfect in its way, perhaps the lowest.
To pass by the purely visible side of these
things, then, is not only to miss a refining
pleasure, but to mistake altogether the medium
in which the most intellectual of the creations of
Greek art, the iEginetan or the Elgin marbles,
for instance, were actually produced ; ev'^en these
having, in their origin, depended for much of
190
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
their charm on the mere material in which they
were executed ; and the whole black and grey
world of extant antique sculpture needing to be
translated back into ivory and gold, if we would
feel the excitement which the Greek seems to
have felt in the presence of these objects. To
have this really Greek sense of Greek sculpture,
it is necessary to connect it, indeed, with the
inner life of the Greek world, its thought and
sentiment, on the one hand ; but on the other
hand to connect it, also, with the minor works
of price, intaglios^ coins, vases ; with that whole
system of material refinement and beauty in
the outer Greek life, which these minor works
represent to us ; and it is with these, as far as
possible, that we must seek to relieve the air of
our galleries and museums of their too intellectual
greyness. Greek sculpture could not have been
precisely a cold thing ; and, whatever a colour-
blind school may say, pure thoughts have their
coldness, a coldness which has sometimes repelled
from Greek sculpture, with its unsuspected fund
of passion and energy in material form, those
who cared much, and with much insight, for a
similar passion and energy in the coloured world
of Italian painting.
Theoretically, then, we need that world of
the minor arts as a complementary background
for the higher and more austere Greek sculpture ;
and, as matter of fact, it is just with such a
world — with a period of refined and exquisite
191
GREEK STUDIES
tectonics (as the Greeks called all crafts strictly
subordinate to architecture), that Greek art
actually begins, in what is called the Heroic
Age, that earliest, undefined period of Greek
civilisation, the beginning of which cannot be
dated, and which reaches down to the first
Olympiad, about the year 776 B.C. Of this
period we possess, indeed, no direct history, and
but few actual monuments, great or small ; but
as to its whole character and outward local
colouring, for its art, as for its politics and
religion. Homer may be regarded as an authority.
The Iliad and the Odyssey, the earliest pictures
of that heroic life, represent it as already delight-
ing itself in the application of precious material
and skilful handiwork to personal and domestic
adornment, to the refining and beautifying of the
entire outward aspect of life ; above all, in the
lavish application of very graceful metal-work to
such purposes. And this representation is borne
out by what little we possess of its actual remains,
and by all we can infer. Mixed, of course, with
mere fable, as a description of the heroic age,
the picture which Homer presents to us, deprived
of its supernatural adjuncts, becomes continuously
more and more realisable as the actual condition
of early art, when we emerge gradually into
historical time, and find ourselves at last among
dateable works and real schools or masters.
The history of Greek art, then, begins, as
some have fancied general history to begin, in a
192
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
golden age, but in an age, so to speak, of real
gold, the period of those first twisters and
hammerers of the precious metals — men who
had already discovered the tiexibility of silver
and the ductility of gold, the capacity of both
for infinite delicacy of handling, and who enjoyed,
with complete freshness, a sense of beauty and
fitness in their work — a period of which that
flower of gold on a silver stalk, picked up lately
in one of the graves at Mycenas, or the legendary
golden honeycomb of Daedalus, might serve as
the symbol. The heroic age of Greek art is the
age of the hero as smith.
There are in Homer two famous descriptive
passages in which this delight in curious metal-
work is very prominent ; the description in the
Iliad of the shield of Achilles,^ and the descrip-
tion of the house of i\lcinous in the Odyssey.'
The shield of Achilles is part of the suit of
armour which Hephsstus makes for him at the
request of Thetis ; and it is wrought of variously
coloured metals, woven into a great circular com-
position in relief, representing the world and
the life in it. The various activities of man are
recorded in this description in a series of idyllic
incidents with such complete freshness, liveliness,
and variety, that the reader from time to time
may well forget himself, and fancy he is reading
a mere description of the incidents of actual life.
1 //. iviii. 468-608. ' Qd. vii. 37-132.
o 193
GREEK STUDIES
We peep into a little Greek town, and see in
dainty miniature the bride coming from her
chamber with torch - bearers and dancers, the
people gazing from their doors, a quarrel between
two persons in the market-place, the assembly •
of the elders to decide upon it. In another
quartering is the spectacle of a city besieged,
the walls defended by the old men, while the
soldiers have stolen out and are lying in ambush.
There is a fight on the river - bank ; Ares and
Athene, conspicuous in gold, and marked as
divine persons by a scale larger than that of their
followers, lead the host. The strange, mythical
images of Ker, Eris, and Kudoimos mingle in
the crowd. A third space upon the shield
depicts the incidents of peaceful labour — the
ploughshare passing through the field, of
enamelled black metal behind it, and golden
before ; the cup of mead held out to the plough-
man when he reaches the end of the furrow ;
the reapers with their sheaves ; the king stand-
ing in silent pleasure among them, intent upon
his staff. There are the labourers in the vine-
yard in minutest detail ; stakes of silver on
which the vines hang ; the dark trench about it,
and one pathway through the midst ; the whole
complete and distinct, in variously coloured
metal. All things and living creatures are in
their places — the cattle coming to water to the
sound of the herdsman's pipe, various music, the
rushes by the water-side, a lion-hunt with dogs,
194
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
the pastures among the hills, a dance, the fair
dresses of the male and female dancers, the
former adorned with swords, the latter with
crowns. It is an image of ancient life, its
pleasure and business. For the centre, as in
some quaint chart of tlie heavens, are the earth
and the sun, the moon and constellations ; and
to close in all, right round, like a frame to the
picture, the great river Oceanus, forming the
rim of the shield, in some metal of dark blue.
Still more fascinating, perhaps, because more
completely realisable by the fancy as an actual
thing — realisable as a delightful place to pass
time in — is the description of the palace of
Alcinous in the little island town of the
Phasacians, to which we are introduced in all
the liveliness and sparkle of the morning, as real
as something seen last summer on the sea-coast ;
although, appropriately, Ulysses meets a goddess,
like a young girl carrying a pitcher, on his way
up from the sea. Below the steep walls of the
town, two projecting jetties allow a narrow
passage into a haven of stone for the ships, into
which the passer-by may look down, as they lie
moored below the roadway. In the midst is the
king's house, all glittering, again, with curiously
wrought metal ; its brightness is " as the bright-
ness of the sun or of the moon." The heart of
Ulysses beats quickly when he sees it standing
amid plantations ingeniously watered, its floor
and walls of brass throughout, with continuous
195
GREEK STUDIES
cornice of dark iron ; the doors are of gold, the
door-posts and lintels of silver, the handles, again,
of gold —
The walls were massy brass ; the cornice high
Blue metals crowned in colours of the sky ;
Rich plates of gold the folding-doors incase j
The pillars silver on a brazen base ;
Silver the lintels deep-projecting o'er ;
And gold the ringlets that command the door.
Dogs of the same precious metals keep watch
on either side, like the lions over the old gate-
w^ay of Mycenas, or the gigantic, human-headed
bulls at the entrance of an Assyrian palace.
Within doors the burning lights at supper-time
are supported in the hands of golden images of
boys, while the guests recline on a couch run-
ning all along the wall, covered with peculiarly
sumptuous women's work.
From these two glittering descriptions mani-
festly something must be deducted ; we are in
wonder-land, and among supernatural or magical
conditions. But the forging of the shield and
the wonderful house of Alcinous are no merely
incongruous episodes in Homer, but the con-
summation of what is always characteristic of
him, a constant preoccupation, namely, with
every form of lovely craftsmanship, resting on all
things, as he says, like the shining of the sun.
We seem to pass, in reading him, through the
treasures of some royal collection ; in him the
presentation of almost every aspect of life is
196
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
beautified by the work, of cunning hands. The
thrones, coffers, couches of curious carpentry,
are studded with bossy ornaments of precious
metal effectively disposed, or inlaid with stained
ivory, or blue cyanus^ or amber, or pale amber-
like gold ; the surfaces of the stone conduits, the
sea-walls, the public washing-troughs, the ram-
parts on which the weary soldiers rest themselves
when returned to Troy, are fair and smooth ; all
the fine qualities, in colour and texture, of woven
stuff are carefully noted — the fineness, closeness,
softness, pliancy, gloss, the whiteness or nectar-
like tints in which the weaver delights to work ;
to weave the sea-purple threads is the appropriate
function of queens and noble women. All the
Homeric shields are more or less ornamented
with variously coloured metal, terrible sometimes,
like Leonardo's, with some monster or grotesque.
The numerous sorts of cups are bossed with
golden studs, or have handles wrought with
figures, of doves, for instance. The great brazen
cauldrons bear an epithet which means fiowery.
The trappings of the horses, the various parts of
the chariots, are formed of various metals. The
women's ornaments and the instruments of their
toilet are described —
— the golden vials for unguents. Use and beauty
are still undivided ; all that men's hands are set
to make has still a fascination alike for workmen
197
GREEK STUDIES
and spectators. For such dainty splendour Troy,
indeed, is especially conspicuous. But then
Homer's Trojans are essentially Greeks — Greeks
of Asia ; and Troy, though more advanced in all
elements of civilisation, is no real contrast to the
western shore of the iEgean. It is no barbaric
world that we see, but the sort of world, we may
think, that would have charmed also our com-
paratively jaded sensibilities, with just that
quaint simplicity which we too enjoy in its
productions ; above all, in its wrought metal,
which loses perhaps more than any other sort of
work by becoming mechanical. The metal-
work which Homer describes in such variety is
all hammer-^ovk^ all the joinings being effected
by pins or riveting. That is just the sort of
metal-work which, in a certain naivete and vigour,
is still of all work the most expressive of actual
contact with dexterous fingers ; one seems to
trace in it, on every particle of the partially
resisting material, the touch and play of the
shaping instruments, in highly trained hands,
under the guidance of exquisitely disciplined
senses — that cachet^ or seal of nearness to the
workman's hand, which is the special charm of
all good metal -work, of early metal -work in
particular.
Such descriptions, however, it may be said,
are mere poetical ornament, of no value in
helping us to define the character of an age.
But what is peculiar in these Homeric descrip-
198
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
tions, what distinguishes them from others at
first sight similar, is a sort of internal evidence
they present of a certain degree of reality, signs
in them of an imagination stirred by surprise at
the spectacle of real works of art. Such minute,
delighted, loving description of details of orna-
ment, such following out of the ways in which
brass, gold, silver, or paler gold, go into the
chariots and armour and women's dress, or cling
to the walls — the enthusiasm of the manner — is
the warrant of a certain amount of truth in all
that. The Greek poet describes these things
with the same vividness and freshness, the same
kind of fondness, with which other poets speak
of flowers ; speaking of them poetically, indeed,
but with that higher sort of poetry which seems
full of the lively impression of delightful things
recently seen. Genuine poetry, it is true, is
always naturally sympathetic with all beautiful
sensible things and qualities. But with how
many poets would not this constant intrusion of
material ornament have produced a tawdry effect !
The metal would all be tarnished and the edges
blurred. And this is because it is not always
that the products of even exquisite tectonics can
excite or refine the aesthetic sense. Now it is
probable that the objects of oriental art, the
imitations of it at home, in which for Homer
this actual world of art must have consisted,
reached him in a quantity, and with a novelty,
just sufficient to warm and stimulate without
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GREEK STUDIES
surfeiting the imagination ; it is an exotic thing
of which he sees just enough and not too much.
The shield of Achilles, the house of Alcinous,
are like dreams indeed, but this sort of dreaming
winds continuously through the entire Iliad and
Odyssey — a child's dream after a day of real,
fresh impressions from things themselves, in
which all those floating impressions re-set them-
selves. He is as pleased in touching and looking
at those objects as his own heroes ; their gleam-
ing aspect brightens all he says, and has taken
hold, one might think, of his language, his very
vocabulary becoming chryselephantine. Homer's
artistic descriptions, though enlarged by fancy,
are not wholly imaginary, and the extant remains
of monuments of the earliest historical age are
like lingering relics of that dream in a tamer but
real world.
The art of the heroic age, then, as represented
in Homer, connects itself, on the one side, with
those fabulous jewels so prominent in mytho-
logical story, and entwined sometimes so oddly
in its representation of human fortunes — the
necklace of Eriphyle, the necklace of Helen,
which Menelaus, it was said, offered at Delphi
to Athene Proncea on the eve of his expedition
against Troy — mythical objects, indeed, but
which yet bear witness even thus early to the
aesthetic susceptibility of the Greek temper.
But, on the other hand, the art of the heroic age
connects itself also with the actual early begin-
200
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
nings of artistic production. There are touches
of reality, for instance, in Homer's incidental
notices of its instruments and processes ; especi-
ally as regards the working of metal. He goes
already to the potter's wheel for familiar, life-like
illustration. In describing artistic wood-work
he distinguishes various stages of work ; we see
clearly the instruments for turning and boring,
such as the old-fashioned drill -borer, whirled
round with a string ; he mentions the names of
two artists, the one of an actual workman, the
other of a craft turned into a proper name — stray
relics, accidentally preserved, of a world, as we
may believe, of such wide and varied activity.
The forge of Hephsstus is a true forge ; the
magic tripods on which he is at work are really
put together by conceivable processes, known in
early times. Compositions in relief similar to
those which he describes were actually made out
of thin metal plates cut into a convenient shape,
and then beaten into the designed form by the
hammer over a wooden model. These reliefs
were then fastened to a differently coloured
metal background or base, with nails or rivets,
for there is no soldering of metals as yet. To
this process the ancients gave the name of
empastik, such embossing being still, in our own
time, a beautiful form of metal-work.
Even in the marvellous shield there are other
and indirect notes of reality. In speaking of the
shield of Achilles, I departed intentionally from
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GREEK STUDIES
the order in which the subjects of the relief are
actually introduced in the Iliad, because, just
then, I wished the reader to receive the full effect
of the variety and elaborateness of the composi-
tion, as a representation or picture of the whole
of ancient life embraced within the circumference
of a shield. But in the order in which Homer
actually describes those episodes he is following
the method of a very practicable form of com-
position, and is throughout much closer than
we might at first sight suppose to the ancient
armourer's proceedings. The shield is formed
of five superimposed plates of different metals,
each plate of smaller diameter than the one
immediately below it, their flat margins showing
thus as four concentric stripes or rings of metal,
around a sort of boss in the centre, five metals
thick, and the outermost circle or ring being the
thinnest. To this arrangement the order of
Homer's description corresponds. The earth
and the heavenly bodies are upon this boss in the
centre, like a little distant heaven hung above
the broad world, and from this Homer works
out, round and round, to the river Oceanus,
which forms the border of the whole ; the
subjects answering to, or supporting each other,
in a sort of heraldic order — the city at peace set
over against the city besieged — spring, summer,
and autumn balancing each other — quite con-
gruously with a certain heraldic turn common
in contemporary Assyrian art, which delights in
202
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
this sort of conventional spacing out of its
various subjects, and especially with some
extant metal chargers of Assyrian work, which,
like some of the earliest Greek vases with
their painted plants and flowers conventionally
arranged, illustrate in their humble measure
such heraldic grouping.
The description of the shield of Hercules,
attributed to Hesiod, is probably an imitation of
Homer, and, notwithstanding some fine mytho-
logical impersonations which it contains, an
imitation less admirable than the original. Of
painting there are in Homer no certain indi-
cations, and it is consistent with the later date
of the imitator that we may perhaps discern
in his composition a sign that what he had
actually seen was a painted shield, in the pre-
dominance in it, as compared with the Homeric
description, of effects of colour over effects of
form ; Homer delighting in ingenious devices
ior fastening the metal, and the supposed Hesiod
rather in what seem like triumphs of heraldic
colouring ; though the latter also delights in
effects of mingled metals, of mingled gold and
silver especially — silver figures with dresses of
gold, silver centaurs with pine-trees of gold
for staves in their hands. Still, like the shield
of Achilles, this too we must conceive as formed
of concentric plates of metal ; and here again
that spacing is still more elaborately carried
out, narrower intermediate rings being apparently
203
GREEK STUDIES
introduced between the broader ones, with
figures in rapid, horizontal, unbroken motion,
carrying the eye right round the shield, in
contrast with the repose of the downward or
inward movement of the subjects which divide
the larger spaces ; here too with certain analogies
in the rows of animals to the designs on the
earliest vases.
In Hesiod then, as in Homer, there are
undesigned notes of correspondence between
the partly mythical ornaments imaginatively
enlarged of the heroic age, and a world of actual
handicrafts. In the shield of Hercules another
marvellous detail is added in the image of
Perseus, very daintily described as hovering in
some wonderful way, as if really borne up by
wings, above the surface. And that curious,
haunting sense of magic in art, which comes
out over and over again in Homer — in the
golden maids, for instance, who assist Hephaestus
in his work, and similar details which seem at
first sight to destroy the credibility of the whole
picture, and make of it a mere wonder-land — is
itself also, rightly understood, a testimony to a
real excellence in the art of Homer's time. It
is sometimes said that works of art held to be
miraculous are always of an inferior kind ; but
at least it was not among those who thought
them inferior that the belief in their miraculous
power began. If the golden images move like
living creatures, and the armour of Achilles, so
204
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
wonderfully made, lifts him like wings, this
again is because the imagination of Homer is
really under the stimulus of delightful artistic
objects actually seen. Only those to whom such
artistic objects manifest themselves through real
and powerful impressions of their wonderful
qualities, can invest them with properties magical
or miraculous.
I said that the inherent usefulness of the
material of metal-work makes the destruction
of its acquired form almost certain, if it comes
into the possession of people either barbarous or
careless of the work of a past time. Greek art
is for us, in all its stages, a fragment only ; in
each of them it is necessary, in a somewhat
visionary manner, to fill up empty spaces, and
more or less make substitution ; and of the
finer work of the heroic age, thus dimly dis-
cerned as an actual thing, we had at least till
recently almost nothing. Two plates of bronze,
a few rusty nails, and certain rows of holes in
the inner surface of the walls of the " treasury "
of Mycenae, were the sole representatives of that
favourite device of primitive Greek art, the
lining of stone walls with burnished metal, of
which the house of Alcinous in the Odyssey
is the ideal picture, and the temple of Pallas
of the Brazen House at Sparta, adorned in the
interior with a coating of reliefs in metal, a
later, historical example. Of the heroic or so-
called Cyclopean architecture, that " treasury,"
205
GREEK STUDIES
a building so imposing that Pausanias thought
it worthy to rank with the Pyramids, is a
sufficient illustration. Treasury, or tomb, or
both (the selfish dead, perhaps, being supposed
still to find enjoyment in the costly armour,
goblets, and mirrors laid up there), this dome-
shaped building, formed of concentric rings of
stones gradually diminishing to a coping-stone at
the top, may stand as the representative of some
similar buildings in other parts of Greece, and of
many others in a similar kind of architecture
elsewhere, constructed of large many-sided blocks
of stone, fitted carefully together without the aid
of cement, and remaining in their places by
reciprocal resistance. Characteristic of it is the
general tendency to use vast blocks of stone for
the jambs and lintels of doors, for instance, and
in the construction of gable -shaped passages ;
two rows of such stones being made to rest
against each other at an acute angle, within the
thickness of the walls.
So vast and rude, fretted by the action of
nearly three thousand years, the fragments of
this architecture may often seem, at first sight,
like works of nature. At Argos, Tiryns,
Mycenas, the skeleton of the old architecture is
more complete. At Mycense the gateway of the
acropolis is still standing with its two well-known
sculptured lions — immemorial and almost unique
monument of primitive Greek sculpture — sup-
porting, herald-wise, a symbolical pillar on the
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BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
vast, triangular, pedimental stone above. The
heads are gone, having been fashioned possibly
in metal by workmen from the East. On what
may be called the fa^ade^ remains are still
discernible of inlaid work in coloured stone,
and within the gateway, on the smooth slabs
of the pavement, the wheel-ruts are still visible.
Connect them with those metal war-chariots in
Homer, and you may see in fancy the whole
grandiose character of the place, as it may really
have been. Shut within the narrow enclosure
of these shadowy citadels were the palaces of the
kings, with all that intimacy which we may
sometimes suppose to have been alien from the
open-air Greek life, admitting, doubtless, below
the cover of their rough walls, many of those
refinements of princely life which the Middle
Age found possible in such places, and of which
the impression is so fascinating in Homer's
description, for instance, of the house of Ulysses,
or of Menelaus at Sparta. Rough and frowning
without, these old chateaux of the Argive kings
were delicate within with a decoration almost
as dainty and fine as the network of weed and
flower that now covers their ruins, and of the
delicacy of which, as I said, that golden flower
on its silver stalk, or the golden honeycomb of
Daedalus, might be taken as representative. In
these metal -like structures of self-supporting
polygons, locked so firmly and impenetrably
together, with the whole mystery of the reason-
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ableness of the arch implicitly within them,
there is evidence of a complete artistic command
over weight in stone, and an understanding of
the " law of weight." But over weight only ;
the ornament still seems to be not strictly
architectural, but, according to the notices of
Homer, tectonic, borrowed from the sister arts,
above all from the art of the metal-workers, to
whom those spaces of the building are left which
a later age fills with painting, or relief in stone.
The skill of the Asiatic comes to adorn this
rough native building ; and it is a late, elaborate,
somewhat voluptuous skill, we may understand,
illustrated by the luxury of that Asiatic chamber
of Paris, less like that of a warrior than of one
going to the dance. Coupled with the vastness
of the architectural works which actually remain,
such descriptions as that in Homer of the
chamber of Paris and the house of Alcinous
furnish forth a picture of that early period —
the tyrants' age, the age of the acropoleis^ the
period of great dynasties with claims to " divine
right," and in many instances at least with all
the culture of their time. The vast buildings
make us sigh at the thought of wasted human
labour, though there is a public usefulness too
in some of these designs, such as the draining of
the Copaic lake, to which the backs of the
people are bent whether they will or not. For
the princes there is much of that selfish personal
luxury which is a constant trait of feudalism in
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BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
all ages. For the people, scattered over the
country, at their agricultural labour, or gathered
in small hamlets, there is some enjoyment, per-
haps, of the aspect of that splendour, of the
bright warriors on the heights — a certain share
of the nobler pride of the tyrants themselves in
those tombs and dwellings. Some surmise, also,
there seems to have been, of the '* curse " of gold,
with a dim, lurking suspicion of curious facilities
for cruelty in the command over those skilful
artificers in metal — some ingenious rack or bull
" to pinch and peel " — the tradition of which,
not unlike the modern Jacques Bonhomme's
shudder at the old ruined French donjon or
bastille, haunts, generations afterwards, the
ruins of those " labyrinths " of stone, where
the old tyrants had their pleasures. For it is
a mistake to suppose that that wistful sense of
eeriness in ruined buildings, to which most of
us are susceptible, is an exclusively modern
feeling. The name Cyclopean^ attached to those
desolate remains of buildings which were older
than Greek history itself, attests their romantic
influence over the fancy of the people who thus
attributed them to a superhuman strength and
skill. And the Cyclopes, like all the early
mythical names of artists, have this note of
reality, that they are names not of individuals
but of classes, the guilds or companies of work-
men in which a certain craft was imparted and
transmitted. The Dactyli, the Fingers^ are the
p 209
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first workers in iron ; the savage Chalybes in
Scythia the first smelters ; actual names are
given to the old, fabled Telchines — Chalkon,
Argyron, Chryson — workers in brass, silver, and
gold, respectively. The tradition of their activity
haunts the several regions where those metals
were found. They make the trident of Poseidon ;
but then Poseidon's trident is a real fisherman's
instrument, the tunny-fork. They are credited,
notwithstanding, with an evil sorcery, unfriendly
to men, as poor humanity remembered the
makers of chains, locks, Procrustean beds ; and,
as becomes this dark, recondite mine and metal
work, the traditions about them are gloomy
and grotesque, confusing mortal workmen with
demon guilds.
To this view of the heroic age of Greek art as
being, so to speak, an age of real gold, an age de-
lighting itself in precious material and exquisite
handiwork in all tectonic crafts, the recent
extraordinary discoveries at Troy and Mycenae
are, on any plausible theory of their date and
origin, a witness. The aesthetic critic needs
always to be on his guard against the confusion
of mere curiosity or antiquity with beauty in art.
Among the objects discovered at Troy — mere
curiosities, some of them, however interesting
and instructive — the so-called royal cup of
Priam, in solid gold, two-handled and double-
lipped, (the smaller lip designed for the host and
his libation, the larger for the guest,) has, in the
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BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
very simplicity of its design, the grace of the
economy with which it exactly fulfils its pur-
pose, a positive beauty, an absolute value for the
aesthetic sense, while strange and new enough,
if it really settles at last a much-debated expres-
sion of Homer ; while the " diadem," with its
twisted chains and flowers of pale gold, shows
that those profuse golden fringes, waving so
comely as he moved, which Hephasstus wrought
for the helmet of Achilles, were really within
the compass of early Greek art.
And the story of the excavations at Mycense
reads more like some well-devised chapter of
fiction than a record of sober facts. Here, those
sanguine, half-childish dreams of buried treasure
discovered in dead men's graves, which seem to
have a charm for every one, are more than
fulfilled in the spectacle of those antique kings,
lying in the splendour of their crowns and
breastplates of embossed plate of gold ; their
swords, studded with golden imagery, at their
sides, as in some feudal monument ; their very
faces covered up most strangely in golden masks.
The very floor of one tomb, we read, was thick
with gold-dust — the heavy gilding fallen from
some perished kingly vestment ; in another was
a downfall of golden leaves and flowers ; and,
amid this profusion of thin fine fragments, were
rings, bracelets, smaller crowns as if for children,
dainty butterflies for ornaments of dresses, and
that golden flower on a silver stalk — all of pure,
21 I
GREEK STUDIES
soft gold, unhardened by alloy, the delicate films
of which one must touch but lightly, yet twisted
and beaten, by hand and hammer, into wavy,
spiral relief, the cuttle-fish with its long un-
dulating arms appearing frequently.
It is the very image of the old luxurious life
of the princes of the heroic age, as Homer
describes it, with the arts in service to its kingly
pride. Among the other costly objects was one
representing the head of a cow, grandly designed
in gold with horns of silver, like the horns of
the moon, supposed to be symbolical of Here,
the great object of worship at Argos. One of
the interests of the study of mythology is that it
reflects the ways of life and thought of the
people who conceived it ; and this religion of
Here, the special religion of Argos, is congruous
with what has been here said as to the place of
art in the civilisation of the Argives ; it is a
reflexion of that splendid and wanton old feudal
life. For Here is, in her original essence and
meaning, equivalent to Demeter — the one living
spirit of the earth, divined behind the veil of all
its manifold visible energies. But in the develop-
ment of a common mythological motive the
various peoples are subject to the general limit-
ations of their life and thought ; they can but
work outward what is within them ; and the
religious conceptions and usages, ultimately
derivable from one and the same rudimentary
instinct, are sometimes most diverse. Out of
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BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
the visible, physical energies of the earth and
its system of annual change, the old Pelasgian
mind developed the person of Demeter, mystical
and profoundly aweful, yet profoundly pathetic,
also, in her appeal to human sympathies. Out
of the same original elements, the civilisation of
Argos, on the other hand, developes the religion
of Queen Here, a mere Demeter, at best, of
gaudy flower-beds, whose toilet Homer describes
with all its delicate fineries ; though, character-
istically, he may still allow us to detect, perhaps,
some traces of the mystical person of the earth,
in the all -pervading scent of the ambrosial
unguent with which she anoints herself, in the
abundant tresses of her hair, and in the curious
variegation of her ornaments. She has become,
though with some reminiscence of the mystical
earth, a very limited human person, wicked,
angry, jealous — the lady of Zeus in her castle-
sanctuary at Mycenas, in wanton dalliance with
the king, coaxing him for cruel purposes in sweet
sleep, adding artificial charms to her beauty.
Such are some of the characteristics with
which Greek art is discernible in that earliest
age. Of themselves, they almost answer the
question which next arises — Whence did art
come to Greece .? or was it a thing of absolutely
native growth there ? So some have decidedly
maintained. Others, who lived in an age possess-
ing little or no knowledge of Greek monuments
anterior to the full development of art under
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GREEK STUDIES
Pheidias, and who, in regard to the Greek sculpture
of the age of Pheidias, were like people criticising
Michelangelo, without knowledge of the earlier
Tuscan school — of the works of Donatello and
Mino da Fiesole — easily satisfied themselves
with theories of its importation ready-made
from other countries. Critics in the last century,
especially, noticing some characteristics which
early Greek work has in common, indeed, with
Egyptian art, but which are common also
to all such early work everywhere, supposed, as
a matter of course, that it came, as the Greek
religion also, from Egypt — that old, immemorial
half-known birthplace of all wonderful things.
There are, it is true, authorities for this deriva-
tion among the Greeks themselves, dazzled as
they were by the marvels of the ancient civil-
isation of Egypt, a civilisation so different from
their own, on the first opening of Egypt to
Greek visitors. But, in fact, that opening did not
take place till the reign of Psammetichus, about
the middle of the seventh century B.C., a relatively
late date. Psammetichus introduced and settled
Greek mercenaries in Egypt, and, for a time,
the Greeks came very close to Egyptian life.
They can hardly fail to have been stimulated by
that display of every kind of artistic workmanship
gleaming over the whole of life ; they may in
turn have freshened it with new motives. And
we may remark, that but for the peculiar usage
of Egypt concerning the tombs of the dead, but
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BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
for their habit of investing the last abodes of the
dead with all the appurtenances of active life,
out of that whole world of art, so various and
elaborate, nothing but the great, monumental
works in stone would have remained to ourselves.
We should have experienced in regard to it,
what we actually experience too much in our
knowledge of Greek art — the lack of a fitting
background, in the smaller tectonic work, for its
great works in architecture, and the bolder sort
of sculpture.
But, one by one, at last, as in the medieval
parallel, monuments illustrative of the earlier
growth of Greek art before the time of Pheidias
have come to light, and to a just appreciation.
They show that the development of Greek art
had already proceeded some way before the
opening of Egypt to the Greeks, and point, if to
a foreign source at all, to oriental rather than
Egyptian influences ; and the theory which de-
rived Greek art, with many other Greek things,
from Egypt, now hardly finds supporters. In
Greece all things are at once old and new. As,
in physical organisms, the actual particles of
matter have existed long before in other com-
binations ; and what is really new in a new
organism is the new cohering force — the mode of
life, — so, in the products of Greek civilisation,
the actual elements are traceable elsewhere by
antiquarians who care to trace them ; the
elements, for instance, of its peculiar national
215
GREEK STUDIES
architecture. Yet all is also emphatically
autochthonous^ as the Greeks said, new-born at
home, by right of a new, informing, combining
spirit playing over those mere elements, and
touching them, above all, with a wonderful sense
of the nature and destiny of man — the dignity
of his soul and of his body — so that in all things
the Greeks are as discoverers. Still, the original
and primary motive seems, in matters of art, to
have come from without ; and the view to
which actual discovery and all true analogies
more and more point is that of a connexion
of the origin of Greek art, ultimately with
Assyria, proximately with Phoenicia, partly
through Asia Minor, and chiefly through Cyprus
— an original connexion again and again re-
asserted, like a surviving trick of inheritance, as
in later times it came in contact with the civil-
isation of Caria and Lycia, old affinities being
here linked anew ; and with a certain Asiatic
tradition, of which one representative is the
Ionic style of architecture, traceable all through
Greek art — an Asiatic curiousness, or troiKCkla,
strongest in that heroic age of which I have
been speaking, and distinguishing some schools
and masters in Greece more than others ; and
always in appreciable distinction from the more
clearly defined and self- asserted Hellenic influ-
ence. Homer himself witnesses to the inter-
course, through early, adventurous commerce, as
in the bright and animated picture with which
216
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
the history of Herodotus begins, between the
Greeks and Eastern countries. We may, perhaps,
forget sometimes, thinking over the greatness of
its place in the history of civilisation, how small
a country Greece really was; how short the
distances onwards, from island to island, to the
coast of Asia, so that we can hardly make a
sharp separation between Asia and Greece, nor
deny, besides great and palpable acts of importa-
tion, all sorts of impalpable Asiatic influences,
by way alike of attraction and repulsion, upon
Greek manners and taste. Homer, as we saw,
was right in making Troy essentially a Greek
city, with inhabitants superior in all culture to
their kinsmen on the Western shore, and perhaps
proportionally weaker on the practical or moral
side, and with an element of languid Ionian
voluptuousness in them, typified by the cedar
and gold of the chamber of Paris — an element
which the austere, more strictly European
influence of the Dorian Apollo will one day
correct in all genuine Greeks. The JEgca.n,
with its islands, is, then, a bond of union, not a
barrier ; and we must think of Greece, as has
been rightly said, as its whole continuous shore.
The characteristics of Greek art, indeed, in
the heroic age, so far as we can discern them,
are those also of Phoenician art, its delight in
metal among the rest, of metal especially as an
element in architecture, the covering of every-
thing with plates of metal. It was from
217
GREEK STUDIES
Phoenicia that the costly material in which
early Greek art delighted actually came — ivory,
amber, much of the precious metals. These
the adventurous Phoenician traders brought in
return for the mussel which contained the
famous purple, in quest of which they penetrated
far into all the Greek havens. Recent dis-
coveries present the island of Cyprus, the great
source of copper and copper-work in ancient
times, as the special mediator between the art
of Phoenicia and Greece ; and in some archaic
figures of Aphrodite with her dove, brought
from Cyprus and now in the British Museum —
objects you might think, at first sight, taken
from the niches of a French Gothic cathedral —
are some of the beginnings, at least, of Greek
sculpture manifestly under the influence of
Phoenician masters. And, again, mythology
is the reflex of characteristic facts. It is
through Cyprus that the religion of Aphrodite
comes from Phoenicia to Greece. Here, in
Cyprus, she is connected with some other
kindred elements of mythological tradition,
above all with the beautiful old story of
Pygmalion, in which the thoughts of art and
love are connected so closely together. First
of all, on the prows of the Phoenician ships,
the tutelary image of Aphrodite Euplcea, the
protectress of sailors, comes to Cyprus — to
Cythera ; it is in this simplest sense that she
is, primarily, Anadyomene, And her connexion
218
BEGINNINGS OF GREER SCULPTURE
with the arts is always an intimate one. In
Cyprus her worship is connected with an
architecture, not colossal, but full of dainty
splendour — the art of the shrine-maker, the
maker of reliquaries ; the art of the toilet, the
toilet of Aphrodite ; the Homeric hymn to
Aphrodite is full of all that ; delight in which
we have seen to be characteristic of the true
Homer.
And now we see why Hephsstus, that crook-
backed and uncomely god, is the husband of
Aphrodite. Hephaestus is the god of fire,
indeed ; as fire he is flung from heaven by
Zeus ; and in the marvellous contest between
Achilles and the river Xanthus in the twenty-
first book of the Iliad, he intervenes in favour
of the hero, as mere fire against water. But he
soon ceases to be thus generally representative
of the functions of fire, and becomes almost
exclusively representative of one only of its
aspects, its function, namely, in regard to early
art ; he becomes the patron of smiths, bent with
his labour at the forge, as people had seen such
real workers ; he is the most perfectly developed
of all the Dasdali, Mulcibers, or Cabeiri. That
the god of fire becomes the god of all art,
architecture included, so that he makes the
houses of the gods, and is also the husband of
Aphrodite, marks a threefold group of facts ;
the prominence, first, of a peculiar kind of art
in early Greece, that beautiful metal-work, with
219
GREEK STUDIES
which he is bound and bent ; secondly, the
connexion of this, through Aphrodite, with an
almost wanton personal splendour; the connexion,
thirdly, of all this with Cyprus and Phoenicia,
whence, literally, Aphrodite comes. Hephaestus
is the " spiritual form " of the Asiatic element in
Greek art.
This, then, is the situation which the first
period of Greek art comprehends ; a people
whose civilisation is still young, delighting, as
the young do, in ornament, in the sensuous
beauty of ivory and gold, in all the lovely
productions of skilled fingers. They receive all
this, together with the worship of Aphrodite, by
way of Cyprus, from Phoenicia, from the older,
decrepit Eastern civilisation, itself long since
surfeited with that splendour ; and they receive
it in frugal quantity, so frugal that their thoughts
always go back to the East, where there is the
fulness of it, as to a wonder-land of art. Received
thus in frugal quantity, through many genera-
tions, that world of Asiatic tectonics stimulates
the sensuous capacity in them, accustoms the
hand to produce and the eye to appreciate the
more delicately enjoyable qualities of material
things. But nowhere in all this various and
exquisite world of design is there as yet any
adequate sense of man himself, nowhere is there
an insight into or power over human form as
the expression of human soul. Yet those arts
of design in which that younger people delights
220
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
have in them already, as designed work, that
spirit of reasonable order, that expressive con-
gruity in the adaptation of means to ends, of
which the fully developed admirableness of
human form is but the consummation — a con-
summation already anticipated in the grand and
animated figures of epic poetry, their power
of thought, their laughter and tears. Under the
hands of that younger people, as they imitate
and pass largely and freely beyond those older
craftsmen, the fire of the reasonable soul will
kindle, little by little, up to the Theseus of the
Parthenon and the Venus of Melos.
The ideal aim of Greek sculpture, as of all
other art, is to deal, indeed, with the deepest
elements of man's nature and destiny, to com-
mand and express these, but to deal with them
in a manner, and with a kind of expression, as
clear and graceful and simple, if it may be, as
that of the Japanese flower-painter. And what
the student of Greek sculpture has to cultivate
generally in himself is the capacity for appre-
ciating the expression of thought in outward
form, the constant habit of associating sense with
soul, of tracing what we call expression to its
sources. But, concurrently with this, he must
also cultivate, all along, a not less equally constant
appreciation of intelligent ivorkmanship in work,
and of design in things designed, of the rational
control of matter everywhere. From many
sources he may feed this sense of intelligence
221
GREEK STUDIES
and design in the productions of the minor
crafts, above all in the various and exquisite art
of Japan. Carrying a delicacy like that of nature
itself into every form of imitation, reproduction,
and combination — leaf and flower, fish and bird,
reed and water — and failing only when it touches
the sacred human form, that art of Japan is not
so unlike the earliest stages of Greek art as
might at first sight be supposed. We have
here, and in no mere fragments, the spectacle
of a universal application to the instruments
of daily life of fitness and beauty, in a temper
still unsophisticated, as also unelevated, by the
divination of the spirit of man. And at least
the student must always remember that Greek
art was throughout a much richer and warmer
thing, at once with more shadows, and more of
a dim magnificence in its surroundings, than the
illustrations of a classical dictionary might induce
him to think. Some of the ancient temples of
Greece were as rich in aesthetic curiosities as a
famous modern museum. That Asiatic irotKiKia,
that spirit of minute and curious loveliness,
follows the bolder imaginative efforts of Greek
art all through its history, and one can hardly
be too careful in keeping up the sense of this
daintiness of execution through the entire course
of its development. It is not only that the
minute object of art, the tiny vase-painting,
intaglio^ coin, or cameo, often reduces into the
palm of the hand lines grander than those of
222
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
many a life-sized or colossal figure ; but there
is also a sense in which it may be said that the
Venus of Melos, for instance, is but a supremely
well-executed object oi njertu^ in the most limited
sense of the term. Those solemn images of the
temple of Theseus are a perfect embodiment of
the human ideal, of the reasonable soul and of
a spiritual world ; they are also the best tnade
things of their kind, as an urn or a cup is well
made.
A perfect, many-sided development of tectonic
crafts, a state such as the art of some nations has
ended in, becomes for the Greeks a mere oppor-
tunity, a mere starting-ground for their imagin-
ative presentment of man, moral and inspired.
A world of material splendour, moulded clay,
beaten gold, polished stone ; — the informing,
reasonable soul entering into that, reclaiming
the metal and stone and clay, till they are as
full of living breath as the real warm body
itself; the presence of those two elements is
continuous throughout the fortunes of Greek
art after the heroic age, and the constant right
estimate of their action and reaction, from period
to period, its true philosophy.
223
II
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES
Critics of Greek sculpture have often spoken of
it as if it had been always work in colourless
stone, against an almost colourless background.
Its real background, as I have tried to show, was
a world of exquisite craftsmanship, touching the
minutest details of daily life with splendour and
skill, in close correspondence with a peculiarly
animated development of human existence — the
energetic movement and stir of typically noble
human forms, quite worthily clothed — amid
scenery as poetic as Titian's. If shapes of
colourless stone did come into that background,
it was as the undraped human form comes into
some of Titian's pictures, only to cool and
solemnise its splendour ; the work of the Greek
sculptor being seldom in quite colourless stone,
nor always or chiefly in fastidiously selected
marble even, but often in richly toned metal
(this or that sculptor preferring some special
variety of the bronze he worked in, such as the
224
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
hepatizon or liver-coloured bronze, or the bright
golden alloy of Corinth), and in its consuminate
products chryselephantine, — work in gold and
ivory, on a core of cedar. Pheidias, in the
Olympian Zeus, in the Athene of the Parthenon,
fulfils what that primitive, heroic goldsmiths*
age, dimly discerned in Homer, already delighted
in ; and the celebrated work of which I have
first to speak now, and with which Greek
sculpture emerges from that half-mythical age
and becomes in a certain sense historical, is a
link in that goldsmiths' or chryselephantine
tradition, carrying us forwards to the work of
Pheidias, backwards to the elaborate Asiatic
furniture of the chamber of Paris.
When Pausanias visited Olympia, towards
the end of the second century after Christ, he
beheld, among other precious objects in the
temple of Here, a splendidly wrought treasure-
chest of cedar-wood, in which, according to a
legend, quick as usual with the true human
colouring, the mother of Cypselus had hidden
him, when a child, from the enmity of her
family, the Bacchiada, then the nobility of
Corinth. The child, named Cypselus after this
incident [Cypsele being a Corinthian word for
chest), became tyrant of Corinth, and his grateful
descendants, as it was said, offered the beautiful
old chest to the temple of Here, as a memorial
of his preservation. That would have been not
long after the year 625 B.C. So much for the
Q 225
GREEK STUDIES
story which Pausanias heard — but inherent
probability, and some points of detail in his
description, tend to fix the origin of the chest at
a date at least somewhat later ; and as Herodotus,
telling the story of the concealment of Cypselus,
does not mention the dedication of the chest at
Olympia at all, it may perhaps have been only
one of many later imitations of antique art. But,
whatever its date, Pausanias certainly saw the
thing, and has left a long description of it, and
we may trust his judgment at least as to its
archaic style. We have here, then, something
plainly visible at a comparatively recent date,
something quite different from those perhaps
wholly mythical objects described in Homer, —
an object which seemed to so experienced an
observer as Pausanias an actual work of earliest
Greek art. Relatively to later Greek art, it may
have seemed to him, what the ancient bronze
doors with their Scripture histories, which we
may still see in the south transept of the cathedral
of Pisa, are to later Italian art.
Pausanias tells us nothing as to its size, nor
directly as to its shape. It may, for anything
he says, have been oval, but it was probably
rectangular, with a broad front and two narrow
sides, standing, as the maker of it had designed,
against the wall ; for, in enumerating the various
subjects wrought upon it, in five rows one above
another, he seems to proceed, beginning at the
bottom on the right-hand side, along the front
226
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
from right to left, and then back again, through
the second row from left to right, and, alternating
thus, upwards to the last subject, at the top, on
the left-hand side.
The subjects represented, most of which had
their legends attached in difficult archaic writing,
were taken freely, though probably with a lead-
ing idea, out of various poetic cycles, as treated
in the works of those so-called cyclic poets, who
continued the Homeric tradition. Pausanias
speaks, as Homer does in his description of
the shield of Achilles, of a kind and amount
of expression in feature and gesture certainly
beyond the compass of any early art, and we
may believe we have in these touches only what
the visitor heard from enthusiastic exegeta^ the
interpreters or sacristans ; though any one who
has seen the Bayeux tapestry, for instance, must
recognise the pathos and energy of which, when
really prompted by genius, even the earliest
hand is capable. Some ingenious attempts have
been made to restore the grouping of the scenes,
with a certain formal expansion or balancing of
subjects, their figures and dimensions, in true
Assyrian manner, on the front and sides. We
notice some fine emblematic figures, the germs
of great artistic motives in after times, already
playing their parts there, — Death, and Sleeps and
Night. " There was a woman supporting on
her right arm a white child sleeping ; and on
the other arm she held a dark child, as if asleep ;
22J
GREEK STUDIES
and they lay with their feet crossed. And the
inscription shows, what might be understood
without it, that they are Death and Sleep, and
Night, the nurse of both of them."
But what is most noticeable is, as I have
already said, that this work, like the chamber of
Paris, like the Zeus of Pheidias, is chrysele-
phantine, its main fabric cedar, and the figures
upon it partly of ivory, partly of gold,^ but (and
this is the most peculiar characteristic of its
style) partly wrought out of the wood of the
chest itself. And, as we read the description,
we can hardly help distributing in fancy gold
and ivory, respectively, to their appropriate
functions in the representation. The cup of
Dionysus, and the wings of certain horses there,
Pausanias himself tells us were golden. Were
not the apples of the Hesperides, the necklace
of Eriphyle, the bridles, the armour, the
unsheathed sword in the hand of Amphiaraus,
also of gold ? Were not the other children, like
the white image of Sleep, especially the naked
child Alcmaeon, of ivory ? with Alcestis and
Helen, and that one of the Dioscuri whose beard
was still ungrown ? Were not ivory and gold,
again, combined in the throne of Hercules, and
in the three goddesses conducted before Paris ?
The " chest of Cypselus " fitly introduces the
first historical period of Greek art, a period
^ Xpva-ovv is the word Pausanias uses, of the cup in the hand of
Dionysus — the wood was flated with gold.'
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BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
coming down to about the year 560 b.c, and
the government of Pisistratus at Athens ; a
period of tyrants like Cypselus and Pisistratus
himself, men of strong, sometimes unscrupulous
individuality, but often also acute and cultivated
patrons of the arts. It begins with a series of
inventions, one here and another there, — in-
ventions still for the most part technical, but
which are attached to single names ; for, with
the growth of art, the influence of individuals,
gifted for the opening of new ways, more and
more defines itself; and the school, open to all
comers, from which in turn the disciples may
pass to all parts of Greece, takes the place of the
family, in which the knowledge of art descends
as a tradition from father to son, or of the
mere trade-guild. Of these early industries we
know little but the stray notices of Pausanias,
often ambiguous, always of doubtful credibility.
What we do see, through these imperfect notices,
is a real period of animated artistic activity,
richly rewarded. Byzes of Naxos, for instance,
is recorded as having first adopted the plan of
sawing marble into thin plates for use on the
roofs of temples instead of tiles ; and that his
name has come down to us at all, testifies to the
impression this fair white surface made on its
first spectators. Various islands of the iEgean
become each the source of some new artistic
device. It is a period still under the reign of
Hephaestus, delighting, above all, in magnificent
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GREEK STUDIES
metal-work. "The Samians," says Herodotus,
" out of a tenth part of their profits — a sum of
six talents — caused a mixing vessel of bronze to
be made, after the Argolic fashion ; around it
are projections of griffins' heads ; and they
dedicated it in the temple of Here, placing be-
neath it three colossal figures of bronze, seven
cubits in height, leaning upon their knees."
That was in the thirty-seventh Olympiad, and
may be regarded as characteristic of the age.
For the popular imagination, a kind of glamour,
some mysterious connexion of the thing with
human fortunes, still attaches to the curious
product of artistic hands, to the ring of Polycrates,
for instance, with its early specimen of engraved
smaragdus, as to the mythical necklace of Har-
monia. Pheidon of Argos first makes coined
money, and the obelisci — the old nail-shaped iron
money, now disused — are hung up in the temple
of Here ; for, even thus early, the temples are
in the way of becoming museums. Names like
those of Eucheir and Eugrammus, who were said
to have taken the art of baking clay vases from
Samos to Etruria, have still a legendary air, yet
may be real surnames ; as in the case of Smilis,
whose name is derived from a graver's tool, and
who made the ancient image of Here at Samos.
Corinth — mater statuaria — becomes a great
nursery of art at an early time. Some time
before the twenty-ninth Olympiad, Butades of
Sicyon, the potter, settled there. The record of
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BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
earlv inventions in Greece is sometimes fondly
coloured with human sentiment or incident. It
is on the butterfly wing of such an incident — the
love-sick daughter of the artist, who outlines on
the wall the profile of her lover as he sleeps in
the lamplight, to keep by her in absence —
that the name of Butades the potter has come
down to us. The father fills up the outline, long
preserved, it was believed, in the Nymphaum at
Corinth, and hence the art of modelling from
the life in clay. He learns, further, a way of
colouring his clay red, and fixes his masks along
the temple eaves.
The temple of Athene Chalcicecus — Athene
of the brazen house — at Sparta, the work of
Gitiades, celebrated about this time as archi-
tect, statuary, and poet ; who made, besides the
image in her shrine, and besides other Dorian
songs, a hymn to the goddess — was so called from
its crust or lining of bronze plates, setting forth,
in richly embossed imagery, various subjects of
ancient legend. What Pausanias, who saw it,
describes, is like an elaborate development of
that method of covering the interiors of stone
buildings with metal plates, of which the
" Treasury " at Mycenae is the earliest historical,
and the house of Alcinous the heroic, type. In
the pages of Pausanias, that glitter, " as of the
moon or the sun," which Ulysses stood still to
wonder at, may still be felt. And on the right
hand of this " brazen house," he tells us, stood an
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GREEK STUDIES
image of Zeus, also of bronze, the most ancient of
all images of bronze. This had not been cast, nor
wrought out of a single mass of metal, but, the
various parts having been finished separately
(probably beaten to shape with the hammer over
a wooden mould), had been fitted together with
nails or rivets. That was the earliest method of
uniting the various parts of a work in metal
— image, or vessel, or breastplate — a method
allowing of much dainty handling of the cunning
pins and rivets, and one which has its place
still, in perfectly accomplished metal-work, as in
the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Coleoni, by
Andrea Verrocchio, in the piazza of St. John
and St. Paul at Venice. In the British Museum
there is a very early specimen of it, — a large
egg-shaped vessel, fitted together of several
pieces, the projecting pins or rivets, forming a
sort of diadem round the middle, being still
sharp in form and heavily gilt. That method
gave place in time to a defter means of joining
the parts together, with more perfect unity and
smoothness of surface, the art of soldering ;
and the invention of this art — of soldering iron,
in the first instance — is coupled with the name
of Glaucus of Chios, a name which, in connexion
with this and other devices for facilitating the
mechanical processes of art, — for perfecting
artistic effect with economy of labour, — became
proverbial, the " art of Glaucus " being attributed
to those who work well with rapidity and ease.
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BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
Far more fruitful still was the invention of
casting, of casting hollow figures especially,
attributed to Rhoecus and Theodoras, architects
of the great temple at Samos. Such hollow
figures, able, in consequence of their lightness, to
rest, almost like an inflated bladder, on a single
point — the entire bulk of a heroic rider, for
instance, on the point of his horse's tail — admit
of a much freer distribution of the whole weight
or mass required, than is possible in any other
mode of statuary ; and the invention of the art
of casting is really the discovery of liberty in
composition.*
And, at last, about the year 576 B.C., we come
to the first true school of sculptors, the first clear
example, as we seem to discern, of a communi-
cable style, reflecting and interpreting some real
individuality (the double personality, in this
case, of two brothers) in the masters who evolved
it, conveyed to disciples who came to acquire it
from distant places, and taking root through
them at various centres, where the names of the
* Pausanias, in recording the invention of casting, uses the word
(X<DV€vcravTOj but does not tell us whether the model was of wai,
as in the later process ; which, however, is believed to have been
the case. For an animated account of the modern process : — the
core of plaister roughly presenting the designed form; the modelling
of the waxen surface thereon, like the skin upon the muscles, with
all its delicate touches — vein and eyebrow; the hardening of
the plaister envelope, layer over layer, upon this delicately finished
model ; the melting of the wax by heat, leaving behind it in its
place the finished design in vacuo, which the molten stream of
metal subsequently fills ; released finally, after cooling, from core
and envelope — see Fortnum's Handbook of Bronzes, Chapter II.
233
GREEK STUDIES
masters became attached, of course, to many
fair works really by the hands of the pupils.
Dipoenus and Scyllis, these first true masters^
were born in Crete ; but their work is connected
mainly with Sicyon, at that time the chief seat
of Greek art. " In consequence of some injury
done them," it is said, "while employed there
upon certain sacred images, they departed to
another place, leaving their work unfinished ;
and, not long afterwards, a grievous famine fell
upon Sicyon. Thereupon, the people of Sicyon,
inquiring of the Pythian Apollo how they might
be relieved, it was answered them, ' if Dipcenus
and Scyllis should finish those images of the
gods ' ; which thing the Sicyonians obtained
from them, humbly, at a great price.'* That
story too, as we shall see, illustrates the spirit of
the age. For their sculpture they used the
white marble of Paros, being workers in marble
especially, though they worked also in ebony
and in ivory, and made use of gilding. " Figures
of cedar-wood, partly incrusted with gold" —
Kk^pov ^a)Bia xP^a-a hL7)v6i(xiiiva — Pausanias says
exquisitely, describing a certain work of their
pupil, Dontas of Lacedsemon. It is to that that
we have definitely come at last, in the school of
Dipoenus and Scyllis.
Dry and brief as these details may seem, they
are the witness to an active, eager, animated
period of inventions and beginnings, in which
the Greek workman triumphs over the first
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BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
rough mechanical difficulties which beset him
in the endeavour to record what his soul con-
ceived of the form of priest or athlete then alive
upon the earth, or of the ever-living gods, then
already more seldom seen upon it. Our own
fancy must fill up the story of the unrecorded
patience of the workshop, into which we seem
to peep through these scanty notices — the fatigue,
the disappointments, the steps repeated, ending
at last in that moment of success, which is all
Pausanias records, somewhat uncertainly.
And as this period begins with the chest
of Cypselus, so it ends with a work in
some respects similar, also seen and described by
Pausanias — the throne, as he calls it, of the
Amyclcean Apollo. It was the work of a well-
known artist, Bathycles of Magnesia, who,
probably about the year 550 b.c, with a company
of workmen, came to the little ancient town of
Amyclae, near Sparta, a place full of traditions of
the heroic age. He had been invited thither to
perform a peculiar task — the construction of a
throne ; not like the throne of the Olympian
Zeus, and others numerous in after times, for
a seated figure, but for the image of the local
Apollo ; no other than a rude and very ancient
pillar of bronze, thirty cubits high, to which,
Hermes-wise, head, arms, and feet were attached.
The thing stood upright, as on a base, upon a
kind of tomb or reliquary, in which, according
to tradition, lay the remains of the young prince
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GREEK STUDIES
Hyacinth, son of the founder of that place,
beloved by Apollo for his beauty, and accident-
ally struck dead by him in play, with a quoit.
From the drops of the lad's blood had sprung up
the purple flower of his name, which bears on
its petals the letters of the ejaculation of woe ;
and in his memory the famous games of Amyclas
were celebrated, beginning about the time of
the longest day, when the flowers are stricken
by the sun and begin to fade — a festival marked,
amid all its splendour, with some real melancholy,
and serious thought of the dead. In the midst
of the "throne" of Bathycles, this sacred
receptacle, with the strange, half- humanised
pillar above it, was to stand, probably in the
open air, within a consecrated enclosure. Like
the chest of Cypselus, the throne was decorated
with reliefs of subjects taken from epic poetry,
and it had supporting figures. Unfortunately,
what Pausanias tells us of this monument hardly
enables one to present it to the imagination with
any completeness or certainty ; its dimensions
he himself was unable exactly to ascertain, and
he does not tell us its material. There are
reasons, however, for supposing that it was of
metal ; and amid these ambiguities, the decora-
tions of its base, the grave or altar-tomb of
Hyacinth, shine out clearly, and are also, for
the most part, clear in their significance.
"There are wrought upon the altar figures,
on the one side of Biris, on the other of
236
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
Amphitrite and Poseidon. Near Zeus and
Hermes, in speech with each other, stand
Dionysus and Semele, and, beside her, Ino.
Demeter, Kore, and Pluto are also wrought
upon it, the Fates and the Seasons above them,
and with them Aphrodite, Athene, and Artemis.
They are conducting Hyacinthus to heaven,
with Polyboea, the sister of Hyacinthus, who
died, as is told, while yet a virgin. . . . Hercules
also is figured on the tomb ; he too carried to
heaven by Athene and the other gods. The
daughters of Thestius also are upon the altar,
and the Seasons again, and the Muses."
It was as if many lines of solemn thought
had been meant to unite, about the resting-place
of this local Adonis, in imageries full of some
dim promise of immortal life.
But it was not so much in care for old idols
as in the making of new ones that Greek art
was at this time engaged. This whole first
period of Greek art might, indeed, be called the
period of graven images^ and all its workmen sons
of Dasdalus ; for Dsdalus is the mythical, or all
but mythical, representative of all those arts
which are combined in the making of lovelier
idols than had heretofore been seen. The old
Greek word which is at the root of the name
Daedalus, the name of a craft rather than a proper
name, probably means to work curiously — all
curiously beautiful wood-work is Daedal work ;
the main point about the curiously beautiful
237
GREEK STUDIES
chamber in which Nausicaa sleeps, in the
Odyssey, being that, like some exquisite Swiss
chalet^ it is wrought in wood. But it came
about that those workers in wood, whom Daedalus
represents, the early craftsmen of Crete especi-
ally, were chiefly concerned with the making of
religious images, like the carvers of Berchtesgaden
and Oberammergau, the sort of daintily finished
images of the objects of public or private devotion
which such workmen would turn out. Where-
ever there was a wooden idol in any way fairer
than others, finished, perhaps, sometimes, with
colour and gilding, and appropriate real dress,
there the hand of Daedalus had been. That
such images were quite detached from pillar or
wall, that they stood free, and were statues in
the proper sense, showed that Greek art was
already liberated from its earlier Eastern associa-
tions ; such free-standing being apparently un-
known in Assyrian art. And then, the effect
of this Daedal skill in them was, that they came
nearer to the proper form of humanity. It is
the wonderful life-likeness of these early images
which tradition celebrates in many anecdotes,
showing a very early instinctive turn for, and
delight in naturalism, in the Greek temper.
As Cimabue, in his day, was able to charm men,
almost as with illusion, by the simple device of
half-closing the eyelids of his personages, and
giving them, instead of round eyes, eyes that
seemed to be in some degree sentient, and to feel
238
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
the light ; so the marvellous progress in those
Daedal wooden images was, that the eyes were
open, so that they seemed to look, — the feet
separated, so that they seemed to walk. Greek
art is thus, almost from the first, essentially
distinguished from the art of Egypt, by an
energetic striving after truth in organic form.
In representing the human figure, Egyptian art
had held by mathematical or mechanical pro-
portions exclusively. The Greek apprehends of
it, as the main truth, that it is a living organism,
with freedom of movement, and hence the
infinite possibilities of motion, and of expression
by motion, with which the imagination credits
the higher sort of Greek sculpture ; while the
figures of Egyptian art, graceful as they often
are, seem absolutely incapable of any motion or
gesture, other than the one actually designed.
The work of the Greek sculptor, together with
its more real anatomy, becomes full also of
human soul.
That old, primitive, mystical, first period of
Greek religion, with its profound, though half-
conscious, intuitions of spiritual powers in the
natural world, attaching itself not to the worship
of visible human forms, but to relics, to natural
or half-natural objects — the roughly hewn tree,
the unwrought stone, the pillar, the holy cone
of Aphrodite in her dimly-lighted cell at Paphos
— had passed away. The second stage in the
development of Greek religion had come ; a
239
GREEK STUDIES
period in which poet and artist were busily
engaged in the work of incorporating all that
might be retained of the vague divinations of
that earlier visionary time, in definite and in-
telligible human image and human story. The
vague belief, the mysterious custom and tradition,
develope themselves into an elaborately ordered
ritual — into personal gods, imaged in ivory and
gold, sitting on beautiful thrones. Always,
wherever a shrine or temple, great or small,
is mentioned, there, we may conclude, was a
visible idol, there was conceived to be the actual
dwelling-place of a god. And this understanding
became not less but more definite, as the temple
became larger and more splendid, fiill of
ceremony and servants, like the abode of an
earthly king, and as the sacred presence itself
assumed, little by little, the last beauties and
refinements of the visible human form and
expression.
In what we have seen of this first period of
Greek art, in all its curious essays and inventions,
we may observe this demand for beautiful idols
increasing in Greece — for sacred images, at first
still rude, and in some degree the holier for their
rudeness, but which yet constitute the beginnings
of the religious style, consummate in the work
of Pheidias, uniting the veritable image of man
in the full possession of his reasonable soul,
with the true religious mysticity, the signature
there of something from afar. One by one these
240
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
new gods of bronze, or marble, or tlcsh-like
ivory, take their thrones, at this or that famous
shrine, like the images of this period which
Pausanias saw in the temple of Here at Olympia
— the throned Seasons^ with Themis as the mother
of the Seasons (divine rectitude being still blended,
in men's fancies, with the unchanging physical
order of things) and Fortune^ and Victory "having
wings," and Kore and Demeter and Dionysus,
already visibly there, around the image of Here
herself, seated on a throne ; and all chrysele-
phantine, all in gold and ivory. Novel as these
things are, they still undergo consecration at
their first erecting. The figure of Athene, in
her brazen temple at Sparta, the work of Gitiades,
who makes also the image and the hymn, in
triple service to the goddess ; and again, that
curious story of Dipoenus and Scyllis, brought
back with so much awe to remove the public
curse by completing their sacred task upon the
images, show how simply religious the age still
was — that this widespread artistic activity was
a religious enthusiasm also ; those early sculptors
have still, for their contemporaries, a divine
mission, with some kind of hieratic or sacred
quality in their gift, distinctly felt.
The development of the artist, in the proper
sense, out of the mere craftsman, effected in
the first division of this period, is now complete ;
and, in close connexion with that busy graving
of religious images, which occupies its second
R 241
GREEK STUDIES
division, we come to something like real person-
alities, to men with individual characteristics —
such men as Ageladas of Argos, Gallon and
Onatas of iEgina, and Ganachus of Sicyon.
Mere fragment as our information concerning
these early masters is at the best, it is at least
unmistakeably information about men with per-
sonal differences of temper and talent, of their
motives, of what we call style. We have come
to a sort of art which is no longer broadly
characteristic of a general period, one whose
products we might have looked at without its
occurring to us to ask concerning the artist, his
antecedents, and his school. We have to do
now with types of art, fully impressed with the
subjectivity, the intimacies of the artist.
Among these freer and stronger personalities
emerging thus about the beginning of the fifth
century before Ghrist — about the period of the
Persian war — the name to which most of this
sort of personal quality attaches, and which is
therefore very interesting, is the name of Ganachus
of Sicyon, who seems to have comprehended in
himself all the various attainments in art which
had been gradually developed in the schools of
his native city — carver in wood, sculptor, brass-
cutter, and toreutes ; by toreutice being meant the
whole art of statuary in metals, and in their
combination with other materials. At last we
seem to see an actual person at work, and to
some degree can follow, with natural curiosity,
242
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
the motions of his spirit and his hand. We
seem to discern in all we know of his productions
the results of individual apprehension — the results,
as well as the limitations, of an individual talent.
It is impossible to date exactly the chief
period of the activity of Canachus. That the
great image of Apollo, which he made for the
Milesians, was carried away to Ecbatana by
the Persian army, is stated by Pausanias ; but
there is a doubt whether this was under Xerxes,
as Pausanias says, in the year 479 B.C., or twenty
years earlier, under Darius. So important a
work as this colossal image of Apollo, for so
great a shrine as the Didymaum, was probably
the task ot his maturity ; and his career may,
therefore, be regarded as having begun, at any
rate, prior to the year 479 B.C., and the end of
the Persian invasion the event which may be said
to close this period of art. On the whole, the
chief period of his activity is thought to have
fallen earlier, and to have occupied the last forty
years of the previous century ; and he would
thus have flourished, as we say, about fifty years
before the manhood of Pheidias, as Mino of
Fiesole fifty years before the manhood of Michel-
angelo.
His chief works were an Aphrodite, wrought
for the Sicyonians in ivory and gold ; that
Apollo of bronze carried away by the Persians,
and restored to its place about the year B.C. 350 ;
and a reproduction of the same work in cedar-
243
GREEK STUDIES
wood, for the sanctuary of Apollo of the Ismenus,
at Thebes. The primitive Greek worship, as
we may trace it in Homer, presents already,
on a minor scale, all the essential characteristics
of the most elaborate Greek worship of after
times — the sacred enclosure, the incense and
other offerings, the prayer of the priest, the
shrine itself — a small one, roofed in by the priest
with green boughs, not unlike a wayside chapel
in modern times, and understood to be the
dwelling-place of the divine person — within,
almost certainly, an idol, with its own sacred
apparel, a visible form, little more than sym-
bolical perhaps, like the sacred pillar for which
Bathycles made his throne at Amyclas, but, if
an actual image, certainly a rude one.
That primitive worship, traceable in almost
all these particulars, even in the first book of
the Iliad, had given place, before the time of
Canachus at Sicyon, to a more elaborate ritual
and a more completely designed image-work ;
and a little bronze statue, discovered on the site
of Tenea, where Apollo was the chief object of
worship,* the best representative of many similar
marble figures — those of Thera and Orchomenus,
for instance — is supposed to represent Apollo as
this still early age conceived him — youthful,
naked, muscular, and with the germ of the
Greek profile, but formally smiling, and with a
formal diadem or fillet, over the long hair which
* Now preserved at Munich.
244
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
shows him to be no mortal athlete. The hands,
like the feet, excellently modelled, are here
extended downwards at the sides ; but in some
similar figures the hands are lifted, and held
straight outwards, with the palms upturned.
The Apollo of Canachus also had the hands thus
raised, and on the open palm of the right hand was
placed a stag, while with the left he grasped the
bow. Pliny says that the stag was an automaton^
with a mechanical device for setting it in motion,
a detail which hints, at least, at the subtlety of
workmanship with which those ancient critics,
who had opportunity of knowing, credited this
early artist. Of this work itself nothing remains,
but we possess perhaps some imitations of it.
It is probably this most sacred possession of the
place which the coins of Miletus display from
various points of view, though, of course, only
on the smallest scale. But a little bronze figure
in the British Museum, with the stag in the
right hand, and in the closed left hand the hollow
where the bow has passed, is thought to have
been derived from it ; and its points of style
are still further illustrated by a marble head of
similar character, also preserved in the British
Museum, which has many marks of having been
copied in marble from an original in bronze.
A really ancient work, or only archaic, it
certainly expresses, together with all that careful
patience and hardness of workmanship which is
characteristic of an early age, a certain Apolline
245
GREEK STUDIES
strength — a pride and dignity in the features,
so steadily composed, below the stiff, archaic
arrangement of the long, fillet-bound locks. It
is the exact expression of that midway position,
between an involved, archaic stiffness and the
free play of individual talent, which is attributed
to Canachus by the ancients.
His Apollo of cedar-wood, which inhabited
a temple near the gates of Thebes, on a rising
ground, below which flowed the river Ismenus,
had, according to Pausanias, so close a re-
semblance to that at Miletus that it required
little skill in one who had seen either of them to
tell what master had designed the other. Still,
though of the same dimensions, while one was
of cedar the other was of bronze — a reproduction
one of the other we may believe, but with the
modifications, according to the use of good
workmen even so early as Canachus, due to the
difference of the material. For the likeness
between the two statues, it is to be observed,
is not the mechanical likeness of those earlier
images represented by the statuette of Tcnea,
which spoke, not of the style of one master, but
only of the manufacture of one workshop. In
those two images of Canachus — the Milesian
Apollo and the Apollo of the Ismenus — there
were resemblances amid differences ; resemblances,
as we may understand, in what was nevertheless
peculiar, novel, and even innovating in the
precise conception of the god therein set forth ;
246
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
resemblances which spoke directly of a single
workman, though working freely, of one hand
and one fancy, a likeness in that which could
by no means be truly copied by another ; it was
the beginning of what we mean by the style
of a master. Together with all the novelty,
the innovating and improving skill, which has
made Canachus remembered, an attractive, old-
world, deeply-felt mysticity seems still to cling
about what we read of these early works. That
piety, that religiousness of temper, of which the
people of Sicyon had given proof so oddly in
their dealings with those old carvers, Scyllis and
Dipoenus, still survives in the master who was
chosen to embody his own novelty of idea and
execution in so sacred a place as the shrine of
Apollo at Miletus. Something still conven-
tional, combined, in these images, with the
effect of great artistic skill, with a palpable
beauty and power, seems to have given them a
really imposing religious character. Escaping
from the rigid uniformities of the stricter archaic
style, he is still obedient to certain hieratic influ-
ences and traditions ; he is still reserved, self-
controlled, composed or even mannered a little,
as in some sacred presence, with the severity
and strength of the early style.
But there are certain notices which seem to
show that he had his purely poetical motives
also, as befitted his age ; motives which
prompted works of mere fancy, like his Muse
247
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with the Lyre^ symbolising the chromatic style
of music ; Aristocles his brother, and Ageladas
of Argos executing each another statue to
symbolise the two other orders of music. The
Riding Boys, of which Pliny speaks, like the
mechanical stag on the hand of Apollo, which
he also describes, were perhaps mechanical toys,
as Benvenuto Cellini made toys. In the Beard-
less /Esculapius, again — the image of the god of
healing, not merely as the son of Apollo, but
as one ever young — it is the poetry of sculpture
that we see.
This poetic feeling, and the piety of temper
so deeply impressed upon his images of Apollo,
seem to have been combined in his chrys-
elephantine Aphrodite, as we see it very dis-
tinctly in Pausanias, enthroned with an apple in
one hand and a poppy in the other, and with the
sphere, or polos, about the head, in its quaint
little temple or chapel at Sicyon, with the
hierokepisy or holy garden, about it. This is
what Canachus has to give us instead of the
strange, symbolical cone, with the lights burning
around it, in its dark cell — the form under
which Aphrodite was worshipped at her famous
shrine of Paphos.
" A woman to keep it fair," Pausanias tells
us, " who may go in to no man, and a virgin
called the water-bearer, who holds her priesthood
for a year, are alone permitted to enter the
sacred place. All others may gaze upon the
248
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
goddess and offer their prayers from the door-
way. The seated image is the work of Cana-
chus of Sicyon. It is wrought in ivory and
gold, bearing a sphere on the head, and having
in the one hand a poppy and in the other an
apple. They offer to her the thighs of all
victims excepting swine, burning them upon
sticks of juniper, together with leaves of lad's-
love, a herb found in the enclosure without,
and nowhere else in the world. Its leaves arc
smaller than those of the beech and larger than
the ilex ; in form they are like an oak-leaf, and
in colour resemble most the leaves of the poplar,
one side dusky, the other white."
That is a place one would certainly have
liked to see. So real it seems ! — the seated
image, the people gazing through the doorway,
the fragrant odour. Must it not still be in
secret keeping somewhere? — we are almost
tempted to ask ; maintained by some few
solitary worshippers, surviving from age to age,
among the villagers of Achaia.
In spite of many obscurities, it may be said
that what we know, and what we do not know,
of Canachus illustrates the amount and sort of
knowledge we possess about the artists of the
period which he best represents. A naivete — a
freshness, an early-aged simplicity and sincerity
— that, we may believe, had we their works
before us, would be for us their chief aesthetic
charm. Cicero remarked that, in contrast with
249
GREEK STUDIES
the works of the next generation of sculptors,
there was a stiffness in the statues of Canachus
which made them seem untrue to nature —
" Canachi signa rigidiora esse quam ut imitentur
veritatem." But Cicero belongs to an age
surfeited with artistic licence, and likely enough
to undervalue the severity of the early masters,
the great motive struggling still with the minute
and rigid hand. So the critics of the last cen-
tury ignored, or underrated, the works of the
earlier Tuscan sculptors. In what Cicero calls
*' rigidity " of Canachus, combined with what we
seem to see of his poetry of conception, his fresh-
ness, his solemnity, we may understand no really
repellent hardness, but only that earnest patience
of labour, the expression of which is constant in
all the best work of an early time, in the David
of Verrocchio, for instance, and in the early
Flemish painters, as it is natural and becoming
in youth itself. The very touch of the struggling
hand was upon the work ; but with the interest,
the half-repressed animation of a great promise,
fulfilled, as we now see, in the magnificent
growth of Greek sculpture in the succeeding
age ; which, however, for those earlier work-
men, meant the loins girt and the half-folded
wings not yet quite at home in the air, with a
gravity, a discretion and reserve, the charm of
which, if felt in quiet, is hardly less than that
of the wealth and fulness of final mastery.
250
THE MARBLES OF ^GINA
I HAVE dwelt the more emphatically upon the
purely sensuous aspects of early Greek art, on
the beauty and charm of its mere material and
workmanship, the grace of hand in it, its chrysele-
phantine character, because the direction of all
the more general criticism since Lessing has
been, somewhat one-sidedly, towards the ideal or
abstract element in Greek art, towards what we
may call its philosophical aspect. And, indeed,
this philosophical element, a tendency to the
realisation of a certain inward, abstract, intel-
lectual ideal, is also at work in Greek art — a
tendency which, if that chryselephantine influence
is called Ionian, may rightly be called the Dorian,
or, in reference to its broader scope, the Euro-
pean influence ; and this European influence or
tendency is really towards the impression of an
order, a sanity, a proportion in all work, which
shall reflect the inward order of human reason,
now fully conscious of itself, — towards a sort of
art in which the record and delineation of
humanity, as active in the wide, inward world of
251
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its passion and thought, has become more or less
definitely the aim of all artistic handicraft.
In undergoing the action of these two oppos-
ing influences, and by harmonising in itself their
antagonism, Greek sculpture does but reflect the
larger movements of more general Greek history.
All through Greek history we may trace, in
every sphere of the activity of the Greek mind,
the action of these two opposing tendencies, — the
centrifugal and centripetal tendencies, as we may
perhaps not too fancifully call them. There is
the centrifugal, the Ionian, the Asiatic tendency,
flying from the centre, working with little fore-
thought straight before it, in the development
of every thought and fancy ; throwing itself
forth in endless play of undirected imagination ;
delighting in brightness and colour, in beautiful
material, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry,
in philosophy, even in architecture and its sub-
ordinate crafts. In the social and political order
it rejoices in the freest action of local and
personal influences ; its restless versatility drives
it towards the assertion of the principles of
separatism, of individualism, — the separation of
state from state, the maintenance of local religions,
the development of the individual in that which
is most peculiar and individual in him. Its
claim is in its grace, its freedom and happiness,
its lively interest, the variety of its gifts to
civilisation ; its weakness is self-evident, and
was what made the unity of Greece impossible.
252
THE MARBLES OF .^GINA
It is this centrifugal tendency which Plato is
desirous to cure, by maintaining, over against it,
the Dorian inHuence of a severe simplification
everywhere, in society, in culture, in the very
physical nature of man. An enemy everywhere
to variegation^ to what is cunning or *' myriad-
minded," he sets himself, in mythology, in music,
in poetry, in every kind of art, to enforce the ideal
of a sort of Parmenidean abstractness and calm.
This exaggerated ideal of Plato's is, however,
only the exaggeration of that salutary European
tendency, which, finding human mind the most
absolutely real and precious thing in the world,
enforces everywhere the impress of its sanity, its
profound reflexions upon things as they really
are, its sense of proportion. It is the centripetal
tendency, which links individuals to each other,
states to states, one period of organic growth to
another, under the reign of a composed, rational,
self-conscious order, in the universal light of the
understanding.
Whether or not this temper, so clearly trace-
able as a distinct influence in the course of Greek
development, was indeed the peculiar gift of the
Dorian race, certainly that race is the best illustra-
tion of it, in its love of order, of that severe com-
position everywhere, of which the Dorian style of
architecture is, as it were, a material symbol — in
its constant aspiration after what is earnest and
dignified, as exemplified most evidently in the
religion of its predilection, the religion of Apollo.
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GREEK STUDIES
For as that Ionian influence, the chrysele-
phantine influence, had its patron in Hephsstus,
belonged to the religion of Hephaestus, husband
of Aphrodite, the representation of exquisite
workmanship, of fine art in metal, coming
from the East in close connexion with the
artificial furtherance, through dress and personal
ornament, of the beauty of the body ; so that
Dorian or European influence embodied itself
in the religion of Apollo. For the develop-
ment of this or that mythological conception,
from its root in fact or law of the physical world,
is very various in its course. Thus, Demeter,
the spirit of life in grass, — and Dionysus, the
" spiritual form " of life in the green sap, —
remain, to the end of men's thoughts and
fancies about them, almost wholly physical. But
Apollo, the " spiritual form " of sunbeams, early
becomes (the merely physical element in his
constitution being almost wholly suppressed)
exclusively ethical, — the *' spiritual form " of
inward or intellectual light, in all its manifesta-
tions. He represents all those specially European
ideas, of a reasonable, personal freedom, as under-
stood in Greece ; of a reasonable polity ; of the
sanity of soul and body, through the cure of
disease and of the sense of sin ; of the perfecting
of both by reasonable exercise or ascesis ; his
religion is a sort of embodied equity, its aim the
realisation of fair reason and just consideration of
the truth of things everywhere.
254
THE MARBLES OF i^GINA
I cannot dwell on the general aspects of this
subject further, but I would remark that in art
also the religion of Apollo was a sanction of, and
an encouragement towards the true valuation of
humanity, in its sanity, its proportion, its know-
ledge of itself. Following after this, Greek art
attained, in its reproductions of human form, not
merely to the profound expression of the highest
indwelling spirit of human intelligence, but to
the expression also of the great human passions,
of the powerful movements as well as of the
calm and peaceful order of the soul, as finding in
the affections of the body a language, the elements
of which the artist might analyse, and then
combine, order, and recompose. In relation to
music, to art, to all those matters over which the
Muses preside, Apollo, as distinct from Hermes,
seems to be the representative and patron of
what I may call reasonable music, of a great
intelligence at work in art, of beauty attained
through the conscious realisation of ideas.
They were the cities of the Dorian affinity
which early brought to perfection that most char-
acteristic of Greek institutions, the sacred dance,
with the whole gymnastic system which was its
natural accompaniment. And it was the familiar
spectacle of that living sculpture which de-
veloped, perhaps, beyond everything else in the
Greek mind, at its best, a sense of the beauty and
significance of the human form.
Into that bewildered, dazzling world of minute
255
GREEK STUDIES
and dainty handicraft — the chamber of Paris, the
house of Alcinous — in which the form of man
alone had no adequate place, and as yet, properly,
was not, this Dorian, European, Apolline influence
introduced the intelligent and spiritual human
presence, and gave it its true value, a value con-
sistently maintained to the end of Greek art, by a
steady hold upon and preoccupation with the in-
ward harmony and system of human personality.
In the works of the Asiatic tradition — the
marbles of Nineveh, for instance — and, so far as
we can see, in the early Greek art, which
derives from it, as, for example, in the archaic
remains from Cyprus, the form of man is in-
adequate, and below the measure of perfection
attained there in the representation of the lower
forms of life ; just as in the little reflective art
of Japan, so lovely in its reproduction of flower
or bird, the human form alone comes almost as
a caricature, or is at least untouched by any
higher ideal. To that Asiatic tradition, then,
with its perfect craftsmanship, its consummate
skill in design, its power of hand, the Dorian, the
European, the true Hellenic influence brought a
revelation of the soul and body of man.
And we come at last in the marbles of JEgim
to a monument, which bears upon it the full
expression of this humanism, — ^to a work, in
which the presence of man, realised with com-
plete mastery of hand, and with clear apprehen-
sion of how he actually is and moves and looks,
256
THE MARBLES OF i^GINA
is touched with the freshest sense of that new-
found, inward vahie ; the energy of worthy
passions purifying, the light of his reason shining
through, bodily forms and motions, solemnised,
attractive, pathetic. We have reached an extant
work, real and visible, of an importance out of
all proportion to anything actually remaining of
earlier art, and justifying, by its direct interest
and charm, our long prelude on the beginnings
of Greek sculpture, while there was still almost
nothing actually to see.
These fifteen figures of Parian marble, of
about two-thirds the size of life, forming, with
some deficiencies, the east and west gables of a
temple of Athene, the ruins of which still stand
on a hill-side by the sea-shore, in a remote part
of the island of iEgina, were discovered in the
year 1811, and having been purchased by the
Crown Prince, afterwards King Louis I., of
Bavaria, are now the great ornament of the
Glyptothek^ or Museum of Sculpture, at Munich.
The group in each gable consisted of eleven
figures ; and of the fifteen larger figures dis-
covered, five belong to the eastern, ten to the
western gable, so that the western gable is
complete with the exception of one figure, which
should stand in the place to which, as the groups
are arranged at Munich, the beautiful figure,
bending down towards the fallen leader, has
been actually transferred from the eastern gable ;
certain fragments showing that the lost figure
s 257
GREEK STUDIES
corresponded essentially to this, which has there-
fore been removed hither from its place in the
less complete group to which it properly belongs.
For there arc two legitimate views or motives in
the restoration of ancient sculpture, the anti-
quarian and the assthetic, as they may be termed
respectively ; the former limiting itself to the
bare presentation of what actually remains of the
ancient work, braving all shock to living eyes
from the mutilated nose or chin ; while the
latter, the aesthetic method, requires that, with
the least possible addition or interference, by the
most skilful living hand procurable, the object
shall be made to please, or at least content the
living eye seeking enjoyment and not a bare fact
of science, in the spectacle of ancient art. This
latter way of restoration, — the assthetic way, —
followed by the famous connoisseurs of the
Renaissance, has been followed here ; and the
visitor to Munich actually sees the marbles of
iEgina, as restored after a model by the tasteful
hand of Thorwaldsen.
Different views have, however, been main-
tained as to the right grouping of the figures ;
but the composition of the two groups was
apparently similar, not only in general character
but in a certain degree of correspondence of all the
figures, each to each. And in both the subject
is a combat, — a combat between Greeks and
Asiatics concerning the body of a Greek hero,
fallen among the foemen, — an incident so char-
258
THE MARBLES OF ^GINA
acteristic of the poetry of the heroic wars. In
both cases, Athene, whose temple this sculpture
was designed to decorate, intervenes, her image
being complete in the western gable, the head
and some other fragments remaining of that in
the eastern. The incidents represented were
probably chosen with reference to the traditions
of JEginz in connexion w^ith the Trojan war.
Greek legend is ever deeply coloured by local
interest and sentiment, and this monument
probably celebrates Telamon, and Ajax his son,
the heroes who established the fame of iEgina,
and whom the united Greeks, on the morning
of the battle of Salamis, in which the ^Eginetans
were distinguished above all other Greeks in
bravery, invited as their peculiar, spiritual allies
from that island.
Accordingly, antiquarians are, for the most
part, of opinion that the eastern gable represents
the combat of Hercules (Hercules being the only
figure among the warriors certainly to be identi-
fied), and of his comrade Telamon, against
Laomedon of Troy, in which, properly, Hercules
was leader, but here, as squire and archer, is
made to give the first place to Telamon, as the
titular hero of the place. Opinion is not so
definite regarding the subject of the western
gable, which, however, probably represents the
combat between the Greeks and Trojans over
the body of Patroclus. In both cases an vEginetan
hero, in the eastern gable Telamon, in the western
259
GREEK STUDIES
his son Ajax, is represented in the extreme crisis
of battle, such a crisis as, according to the deep
rehgiousness of the Greeks of that age, was a
motive for the visible intervention of the goddess
in favour of her chosen people.
Opinion as to the date of the work, based
mainly on the characteristics of the work itself,
has varied within a period ranging from the
middle of the sixtieth to the middle of the
seventieth Olympiad, inclining on the whole to
the later date, in the period of the Ionian revolt
against Persia, and a few years earlier than the
battle of Marathon.
In this monument, then, we have a revelation
in the sphere of art, of the temper which made
the victories of Marathon and Salamis possible, of
the true spirit of Greek chivalry as displayed in
the Persian war, and in the highly ideal con-
ception of its events, expressed in Herodotus and
approving itself minutely to the minds of the
Greeks, as a series of affairs in which the gods
and heroes of old time personally intervened, and
that not as mere shadows. It was natural that
the high-pitched temper, the stress of thought
and feeling, which ended in the final conflict of
Greek liberty with Asiatic barbarism, should
stimulate quite a new interest in the poetic
legends of the earlier conflict between them in
the heroic age. As the events of the Crusades
and the chivalrous spirit of that period, leading
men's minds back to ponder over the deeds of
260
THE MARBLES OF .€GINA
Charlemagne and his paladins, gave birth to the
composition of the Song of Roland, just so this
i^ginetan sculpture displays the Greeks of a
later age feeding their enthusiasm on the legend
of a distant past, and is a link between Herodotus
and Homer. In those ideal figures, pensive a
little from the first, we may suppose, with the
shadowiness of a past age, wc may yet see how
Greeks of the time of Themistocles really con-
ceived of Homeric knight and squire.
Some other fragments of art, also discovered
in i^gina, and supposed to be contemporary with
the temple of Athene, tend, by their roughness
and immaturity, to show that this small building,
so united in its effect, so complete in its simplicity,
in the symmetry of its two main groups of
sculpture, was the perfect artistic flower of its
time and place. Yet within the limits of this
simple unity, so important an element in the
charm and impressiveness of the place, a certain
inequality of design and execution may be
detected ; the hand of a slightly earlier master,
probably, having worked in the western gable,
while the master of the eastern gable has gone
some steps farther than he in fineness and power
of expression ; the stooping figure of the sup-
posed Ajax, — belonging to the western group in
the present arrangement, but really borrowed, as
I said, from the eastern, — which has in it some-
thing above the type of the figures grouped round
it, being this later sculptor's work. Yet Over-
261
GREEK STUDIES
beck, who has elaborated the points of this
distinction of styles, commends without reserve
the technical excellence of the whole work,
executed, as he says, " with an application of all
known instruments of sculpture ; the delicate
calculation of weight in the composition of the
several parts, allowing the artist to dispense with
all artificial supports, and to set his figures, with
all their complex motions, and yet with plinths
only three inches thick, into the basis of the
gable ; the bold use of the chisel, which wrought
the shield, on the freely-held arm, down to a
thickness of scarcely three inches ; the fineness
of the execution, even in parts of the work
invisible to an ordinary spectator, in the diligent
finishing of which the only motive of the artist
was to satisfy his own conviction as to the nature
of good sculpture."
It was the Dorian cities, Plato tells us, which
first shook off the false Asiatic shame, and
stripped off their clothing for purposes of
exercise and training in the gymnasium ; and it
was part of the Dorian or European influence to
assert the value in art of the unveiled and healthy
human form. And here the artists of ^gina,
notwithstanding Homer's description of Greek
armour, glowing like the sun itself, have dis-
played the Greek warriors — Greek and Trojan
alike — not in the equipments they would really
have worn, but naked, — flesh fairer than that
golden armour, though more subdued and tran-
262
THE MARBLES OF JEGINA
quil in effect on the spectator, the undraped
form of man coming like an embodiment of
the Hellenic spirit, and as an element of temper-
ance, into the somewhat gaudy spectacle of
Asiatic, or archaic art. Paris alone bears his
dainty trappings, characteristically, — a coat ot
golden scale-work, the scales set on a lining of
canvas or leather, shifting deftly over the delicate
body beneath, and represented on the gable by
the gilding, or perhaps by real gilt metal.
It was characteristic also of that more truly
Hellenic art — another element of its temperance
— to adopt the use of marble in its works ; and
the material of these figures is the white marble
of Paros. Traces of colour have, however, been
found on certain parts of them. The outer
surfaces of the shields and helmets have been
blue ; their inner parts and. the crests of the
helmets, red ; the hem of the drapery of Athene,
the edges of her sandals, the plinths on which
the figures stand, also red ; one quiver red,
another blue ; the eyes and lips, too, coloured ;
perhaps, the hair. There was just a limited and
conventionalised use of colour, in effect, upon
the marble.
And although the actual material of these
figures is marble, its coolness and massiveness
suiting the growing severity of Greek thought,
yet they have their reminiscences of work in
bronze, in a certain slimness and tenuity, a certain
dainty lightness of poise in their grouping, which
263
GREEK STUDIES
remains in the memory as a peculiar note of their
style ; the possibility of such easy and graceful
balancing being one of the privileges or oppor-
tunities of statuary in cast metal, of that hollow
casting in which the whole weight of the work
is so much less than that of a work of equal size
in marble, and which permits so much wider
and freer a disposition of the parts about its centre
of gravity. In JEgina. the tradition of metal-
work seems to have been strong, and Onatas,
whose name is closely connected with -^gina,
and who is contemporary with the presumably
later portion of this monument, was above all a
worker in bronze. Here again, in this lurking
spirit of metal-work, we have a new element of
complexity in the character of these precious
remains. And then, to compass the whole work
in our imagination, we must conceive yet another
element in the conjoint effect ; metal being
actually mingled with the marble, brought thus
to its daintiest point of refinement, as the little
holes indicate, bored into the marble figures for
the attachment of certain accessories in bronze,
— lances, swords, bows, the Medusds head on the
agis of Athene, and its fringe of little snakes.
And as there was no adequate consciousness
and recognition of the essentials of man's nature
in the older, oriental art, so there is no pathos,
no humanity in the more special sense, but a kind
of hardness and cruelty rather, in those oft-
repeated, long, matter-of-fact processions, on the
264
THE MARBLES OF i^GINA
marbles of Nineveh, of slave-like soldiers on
their way to battle mechanically, or of captives
on their w^ay to slavery or death, for the satisfac-
tion of the Great King. These Greek, marbles,
on the contrary, with that figure yearning forward
so graciously to the fallen leader, are deeply
impressed with a natural pathetic effect — the
true reflexion again of the temper of Homer in
speaking of war. Ares, the god of war himself,
we must remember, is, according to his original
import, the god of storms, of winter raging
among the forests of the Thracian mountains, a
brother of the north wind. It is only afterwards
that, surviving many minor gods of war, he
becomes a leader of hosts, a sort of divine knight
and patron of knighthood ; and, through the old
intricate connexion of love and war, and that
amorousness which is the universally conceded
privilege of the soldier's life, he comes to be
very near Aphrodite, — the paramour of the
goddess of physical beauty. So that the idea of
a sort of soft dalliance mingles, in his character,
so unlike that of the Christian leader. Saint
George, with the idea of savage, warlike im-
pulses ; the fair, soft creature suddenly raging
like a storm, to which, in its various wild inci-
dents, war is constantly likened in Homer ; the
effects of delicate youth and of tempest blending,
in Ares, into one expression, not without that
cruelty which mingles also, like the influence of
some malign fate upon him, with the finer
265
GREEK STUDIES
characteristics of Achilles, who is a kind of
merely human double of Ares. And in Homer's
impressions of war the same elements are blent,
— the delicacy, the beauty of youth, especially,
which makes it so fit for purposes of love,
spoiled and wasted by the random flood and fire
of a violent tempest ; the glittering beauty of
the Greek " war-men," expressed in so many
brilliant figures, and the splendour of their
equipments, in collision with the miserable
accidents of battle, and the grotesque indignities
of death in it, brought home to our fancy by a
hundred pathetic incidents, — the sword hot with
slaughter, the stifling blood in the throat, the
spoiling of the body in every member severally.
He thinks of, and records, at his early ending,
the distant home from which the boy came, who
goes stumbling now, just stricken so wretchedly,
his bowels in his hands. He pushes the ex-
pression of this contrast to the macabre even,
suggesting the approach of those lower forms of
life which await to-morrow the fair bodies of
the heroes, who strive and fall to-day like these
in the ^ginetan gables. For it is just that two-
fold sentiment which this sculpture has embodied.
The seemingly stronger hand which wrought
the eastern gable has shown itself strongest in
the rigid expression of the truth of pain, in the
mouth of the famous recumbent figure on the
extreme left, the lips just open at the corner, and
in the hard-shut lips of Hercules. Otherwise,
266
THE MARBLES OF iEGINA
these figures all smile faintly, almost like the
monumental effigies of the Middle Age, with a
smile which, even if it be but a result of the
mere conventionality of an art still somewhat
immature, has just the pathetic effect of Homer's
conventional epithet " tender," when he speaks
of the tlesh of his heroes.
And together with this touching power there is
also in this work the effect of an early simplicity,
the charm of its limitations. For as art which
has passed its prime has sometimes the charm
of an absolute refinement in taste and w^orkman-
ship, so immature art also, as we now see, has
its own attractiveness in the narjete^ the freshness
of spirit, which finds power and interest in
simple motives of feeling, and in the freshness
of hand, which has a sense of enjoyment in
mechanical processes still performed unmechanic-
ally, in the spending of care and intelligence
on every touch. As regards Italian art, the
sculpture and paintings of the earlier Renais-
sance, the aesthetic value of this naivete is now
well understood ; but it has its value in Greek
sculpture also. There, too, is a succession ot
phases through which the artistic power and
purpose grew to maturity, with the enduring
charm of an unconventional, unsophisticated
freshness, in that very early stage of it illustrated
by these marbles of ^gina, not less than in
the work of Verrocchio and Mino of Fiesole.
Effects of this we may note in that sculpture
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GREEK STUDIES
of iEgina, not merely in the simplicity, or
monotony even, of the whole composition, and
in the exact and formal correspondence of one
gable to the other, but in the simple readiness
with which the designer makes the two second
spearmen kneel, against the probability of the
thing, so as just to fill the space he has to
compose in. The profiles are still not yet of
the fully developed Greek type, but have a
somewhat sharp prominence of nose and chin, as
in Etrurian design, in the early sculpture of
Cyprus, and in the earlier Greek vases ; and
the general proportions of the body in relation
to the shoulders are still somewhat archaically
slim. But then the workman is at work in
dry earnestness, with a sort of hard strength in
detail, a scrupulousness verging on stiffness, like
that of an early Flemish painter ; he communi-
cates to us his still youthful sense of pleasure in
the experience of the first rudimentary difficulties
of his art overcome. And withal, these figures
have in them a true expression of life, of anima-
tion. In this monument of Greek chivalry,
pensive and visionary as it may seem, those old
Greek knights live with a truth like that of
Homer or Chaucer. In a sort of stifif grace,
combined with a sense of things bright or
sorrowful directly felt, the iEginetan workman
is as it were the Chaucer of Greek sculpture.
268
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
A CHAPTER IN GREEK ART
It is pleasant when, looking at medieval sculpture,
we are reminded of that of Greece ; pleasant
likewise, conversely, in the study of Greek work
to be put on thoughts of the Middle Age. To
the refined intelligence, it would seem, there is
something attractive in complex expression as
such. The Marbles of Mgina, then, may remind
us of the Middle Age where it passes into the
early Renaissance, of its most tenderly finished
warrior-tombs at Westminster or in Florence.
A less mature phase of medieval art is recalled
to our fancy by a primitive Greek work in the
Museum of Athens, Hermes, bearing a ram, a
little one, upon his shoulders. He bears it thus,
had borne it round the walls of Tanagra, as its
citizens told, by way of purifying that place from
the plague, and brings to mind, of course, later
images of the '* Good Shepherd." It is not the
subject of the work, however, but its style, that
sets us down in thought before some gothic
269
GREEK STUDIES
cathedral front. Suppose the Hermes Kriophorus
lifted into one of those empty niches, and the
archaeologist will inform you rightly, as at
Auxerre or Wells, of Italian influence, perhaps
of Italian workmen, and along with them indirect
old Greek influence coming northwards ; while
the connoisseur assures us that all good art, at
its respective stages of development, is in essential
qualities everywhere alike. It is observed, as a
note of imperfect r^kill, that in that carved block
of stone the animal is insufficiently detached
from the shoulders of its bearer. Again, how
precisely gothic is the effect ! Its very limita-
tion as sculpture emphasises the function of the
thing as an architectural ornament. And the
student of the Middle Age, if it came within
his range, would be right in so esteeming it.
Hieratic, stiff and formal, if you will, there is
a knowledge of the human body in it neverthe-
less, of the body, and of the purely animal soul
therein, full of the promise of what is coming in
that chapter of Greek art which may properly
be entitled, " The Age of Athletic Prizemen."
That rude image, a work perhaps of Calamis
of shadowy fame, belongs to a phase of art still
in grave-clothes or swaddling-bands, still strictly
surbordinate to religious or other purposes not
immediately its own. It had scarcely to wait
for the next generation to be superseded, and we
need not wonder that but little of it remains.
But that it was a widely active phase of art, with
270
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
all the vigour of local varieties, is attested by
another famous archaic monument, too full of a
kind of sacred poetr^^ to be passed by. The
reader does not need to be reminded that the
Greeks, vivid as was their consciousness of this
life, cared much always for the graves of the
dead ; that to be cared for, to be honoured, in
one's grave, to have rvfifio^ dfi(f)L7ro\o<i^ a frequented
tomb, as Pindar says, was a considerable motive
with them, even among the young. In the
study of its funeral monuments we might indeed
follow closely enough the general development
of art in Greece from beginning to end. The
carved slab of the ancient shepherd of Orcho-
menus, with his dog and rustic staff, the stele
of the ancient man-at-arms signed " Aristocles,"
rich originally with colour and gold and fittings
of bronze, are among the few still visible pictures,
or portraits, it may be, of the earliest Greek life.
Compare them, compare their expression, for
a moment, with the deeply incised tombstones
of the Brethren of St. Francis and their clients,
which still roughen the pavement of Santa
Croce at Florence, and recal the varnished poly-
chrome decoration of those Greek monuments in
connexion with the worn-out blazonry of the
funeral brasses of England and Flanders. The
Shepherd, the Hoplite, begin a series continuous
to the era of full Attic mastery in its gentlest
mood, with a large and varied store of memorials
of the dead, which, not so strangely as it may
271
GREEK STUDIES
seem at first sight, are like selected pages from
daily domestic life. See, for instance, at the
British Museum, Trypho, "the son of Eutychus,"
one of the very pleasantest human likenesses
there, though it came from a cemetery — a son
it was hard to leave in it at nineteen or twenty.
With all the suppleness, the delicate muscu-
larity, of the flower of his youth, his handsome
face sweetened by a kind and simple heart, in
motion, surely, he steps forth from some shadowy
chamber, strigil in hand, as of old, and with his
coarse towel or cloak of monumental drapery
over one shoulder. But whither precisely, you
may ask, and as what, is he moving there in the
doorway ? Well ! in effect, certainly, it is the
memory of the dead lad, emerging thus from
his tomb, — the still active soul, or permanent
thought, of him, as he most liked to be.
The Harpy Tomb, so called from its mysterious
winged creatures with human faces, carrying the
little shrouded souls of the dead, is a work many
generations earlier than that graceful monument
of Trypho. It was from an ancient cemetery
at Xanthus in Lycia that it came to the British
Museum. The Lycians were not a Greek
people ; but, as happened even with "barbarians'*
dwelling on the coast of Asia Minor, they
became lovers of the Hellenic culture, and Xan-
thus, their capital, as may be judged from the
beauty of its ruins, managed to have a consider-
able portion in Greek art, though infusing it
272
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
with a certain Asiatic colour. The tVugally
designed frieze of the Harpy Tomb, in the
lowest possible relief, might fairly be placed
between the monuments of Assyria and those
primitive Greek works among which it now
actually stands. The stiffly ranged figures in
any other than strictly archaic work would seem
affected. But what an undercurrent of refined
sentiment, presumably not Asiatic, not "barbaric,"
lifting those who felt thus about death so early
into the main stream of Greek humanity, and to
a level of visible refinement in execution duly
expressive of it !
In that old burial-place of Xanthus, then, a
now nameless family, or a single bereaved member
of it, represented there as a diminutive figure
crouching on the earth in sorrow, erected this
monument, so full of family sentiment, and of so
much value as illustrating what is for us a some-
what empty period in the history of Greek art,
strictly so called. Like the less conspicuously
adorned tombs around it, like the tombs in
Homer, it had the form of a tower — a square
tower about twenty-four feet high, hollowed at
the top into a small chamber, for the reception,
through a little doorway, of the urned ashes of
the dead. Four sculptured slabs were placed at
this level on the four sides of the tower in the
manner of a frieze. I said that the winged
creatures with human faces carry the little souls
of the dead. The interpretation of these mystic
T 273
GREEK STUDIES
imageries is, in truth, debated. But in face of
them, and remembering how the sculptors and
glass -painters of the Middle Age constantly
represented the souls of the dead as tiny bodies,
one can hardly doubt as to the meaning of these
particular details which, repeated on every side,
seem to give the key-note of the whole composi-
tion.-^ Those infernal, or celestial, birds, indeed,
are not true to what is understood to be the
harpy form. Call them sirens, rather. People,
and not only old people, as you know, appear
sometimes to have been quite charmed away by
what dismays most of us. The tiny shrouded
figures which the sirens carry are carried very
tenderly, and seem to yearn in their turn towards
those kindly nurses as they pass on their way to
a new world. Their small stature, as I said,
does not prove them infants, but only new-born
into that other life, and contrasts their helpless-
ness with the powers, the great presences, now
around them. A cow, far enough from Myron's
famous illusive animal, suckles her calf. She is
^ In some fine reliefs of the thirteenth century, Jesus himself
draws near to the deathbed of his Mother. The soul has already-
quitted her body, and is seated, a tiny crowned figure, on his left
arm (as she had carried Him) to be taken to heaven. In the
beautiful early fourteenth century monument of Aymer de Valence
at Westminster, the soul of the deceased, " a small figure wrapped
in a mantle," is supported by two angels at the head of the tomb.
Among many similar instances may be mentioned the soul of the
beggar, Lazarus, on a carved capital at Vezelay ; and the same
subject in a coloured window at Bourges. The clean, white little
creature seems glad to escape from the body, tattooed all over with
its sores in a regular pattern.
274
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
one ot almost any number of artistic symbols of
new-birth, of the renewal of life, drawn from a
world which is, after all, so full of it. On one
side sits enthroned, as some have thought, the
Goddess of Death ; on the opposite side the
Goddess of Life, with her flowers and fruit.
Towards her three young maidens are advancing
— were they still alive thus, graceful, virginal,
with their long, plaited hair, and long, delicately-
folded tunics, looking forward to carry on their
race into the future ? Presented severally, on
the other sides of the dark hollow within, three
male persons — a young man, an old man, and
a boy — seem to be bringing home, somewhat
wearily, to their " long home," the young man,
his armour, the boy, and the old man, like old
Socrates, the mortuary cock, as they approach
some shadowy, ancient deity of the tomb, or it
may be the throned impersonation of their
" fathers of old." The marble surface was
coloured, at least in part, with fixtures of metal
here and there. The designer, whoever he may
have been, was possessed certainly of some
tranquillising second thoughts concerning death,
which may well have had their value for
mourners ; and he has expressed those thoughts,
if lispingly, yet with no faults of commission,
with a befitting grace, and, in truth, at some
points, with something already of a really
Hellenic definition and vigour. He really speaks
to us in his work, through his symbolic and
275
GREEK STUDIES
imitative figures, — speaks to our intelligence
persuasively.
The surviving thought of the lad Trypho,
returning from his tomb to the living, was of
athletic character ; how he was and looked
when in the flower of his strength. And it is
not of the dead but of the living, who look and
are as he, that the artistic genius of this period
is full. It is a period, truly, not of battles, such
as those commemorated in the Marbles of Mgtna^
but of more peaceful contests — at Olympia, at
the Isthmus, at Delphi — the glories of which
Pindar sang in language suggestive of a sort of
metallic beauty, firmly cut and embossed, like
crowns of wild olive, of parsley and bay, in crisp
gold. First, however, it had been necessary that
Greece should win its liberty, political standing-
ground, and a really social air to breathe in, with
development of the youthful limbs. Of this
process Athens was the chief scene ; and the
earliest notable presentment of humanity by
Athenian art was in celebration of those who
had vindicated liberty with their lives — two
youths again, in a real incident, which had,
however, the quality of a poetic invention,
turning, as it did, on that ideal or romantic
friendship which was characteristic of the
Greeks.
With something, perhaps, of hieratic con-
vention, yet presented as they really were, as
friends and admirers loved to think of them,
276
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
Harmodius and Aristogeiton stood, then, soon
after their heroic death, side by side in bronze,
the work of Antenor, in a way not to be forgotten,
when, thirty years afterwards, a foreign tyrant,
Xerxes, carried them away to Persia. Kritios
and Nesistes were, therefore, employed for a
reproduction of them, which would naturally
be somewhat more advanced in style. In its
turn this also disappeared. The more curious
student, however, would still fancy he saw the
trace of it — of that copy, or of the original, after-
wards restored to Athens — here or there, on vase
or coin. But in fact the very images of the
heroic youths were become but ghosts, haunting
the story of Greek art, till they found or seemed
to find a body once more when, not many years
since, an acute observer detected, as he thought,
in a remarkable pair of statues in the Museum
of Naples, if freed from incorrect restorations
and rightly set together, a veritable descendant
from the original work of Antenor. With all
their truth to physical form and movement, with
a conscious mastery of delineation, they were,
nevertheless, in certain details, in the hair, for
instance, archaic, or rather archaistic — designedly
archaic, as from the hand of a workman, for
whom, in this subject, archaism, the very touch
of the ancient master, had a sentimental or even
a religious value. And unmistakeably they were
young assassins, moving, with more than fraternal
unity, the younger in advance of and covering
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GREEK STUDIES
the elder, according to the account given by
Herodotus, straight to their purpose ; — against
two wicked brothers, as you remember, two
good friends, on behalf of the dishonoured sister
of one of them.
Archasologists have loved to adjust them
tentatively, with various hypotheses as to the
precise manner in which they thus went together.
Meantime they have figured plausibly as repre-
sentative of Attic sculpture at the end of its
first period, still immature indeed, but with a
just claim to take breath, so to speak, having
now accomplished some stades of the journey.
Those young heroes of Athenian democracy,
then, indicate already what place Athens and
Attica will occupy in the supreme age of art
soon to come ; indicate also the subject from
which that age will draw the main stream of its
inspiration — living youth, " iconic " in its exact
portraiture, or " heroic " as idealised in various
degrees under the influence of great thoughts
about it — youth in its self-denying contention
towards great effects ; great intrinsically, as at
Marathon, or when Harmodius and Aristogeiton
fell, or magnified by the force and splendour of
Greek imagination with the stimulus of the
national games. For the most part, indeed,
it is not with youth taxed spasmodically, like
that of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and the
" necessity " that was upon it, that the Athenian
mind and heart are now busied ; but with youth
278
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
in its voluntary labours, its habitual and measured
discipline, labour for its own sake, or in wholly
friendly contest for prizes which in reality borrow
all their value from the quality of the receiver.
We are with Pindar, you see, in this athletic
age of Greek sculpture. It is the period no
longer of battle against a foreign foe, recalling
the Homeric ideal, nor against the tyrant at
home, fixing a dubious ideal for the future, but
of peaceful combat as a fine art — pulvis Olympicus,
Anticipating the arts, poetry, a generation before
Myron and Polycleitus, had drawn already from
the youthful combatants in the great national
games the motives of those Odes, the bracing
words of which, as I said, are like work in fine
bronze, or, as Pindar himself suggests, in ivory
and gold. Sung in the victor's supper-room, or
at the door of his abode, or with the lyre and
the pipe as they took him home in procession
through the streets, or commemorated the happy
day, or in a temple where he laid up his crown,
Pindar's songs bear witness to the pride of family
or township in the physical perfection of son or
citizen, and his consequent success in the long
or the short foot-race, or the foot-race in armour,
or the pentathlon, or any part of it. " Now on
one, now on another," as the poet tells, " doth
the grace that quickcneth (quickeneth, literally,
on the race-course) look favourably." "Apto-rov
v^oip he declares indeed, and the actual prize, as
we know, was in itself of little or no worth — a
279
GREEK STUDIES
cloak, in the Athenian games, but at the greater
games a mere handful of parsley, a few sprigs of
pine or wild olive. The prize has, so to say,
only an intellectual or moral value. Yet actually
Pindar's own verse is all of gold and wine and
flowers, is itself avowedly a flower, or " liquid
nectar," or " the sweet fruit of his soul to men
that are winners in the games." " As when
from a wealthy hand one lifting a cup, made
glad within with the dew of the vine, maketh
gift thereof to a youth " : — the keynote of
Pindar's verse is there ! This brilliant living
youth of his day, of the actual time, for whom,
as he says, he "awakes the clear -toned gale
of song" — eVeW oliiov \iyvv — that song mingles
sometimes with the splendours of a recorded
ancient lineage, or with the legendary greatness
of a remoter past, its gods and heroes, patrons or
ancestors, it might be, of the famous young man
of the hour, or with the glory and solemnity of
the immortals themselves taking a share in
mortal contests. On such pretext he will tell
a new story, or bring to its last perfection by his
manner of telling it, his pregnancy and studied
beauty of expression, an old one. The tale of
Castor and Polydeukes, the appropriate patrons
of virginal yet virile youth, starred and mounted,
he tells in all its human interest.
" Ample is the glory stored up for Olympian
winners." And what Pindar's contemporaries
asked of him for the due appreciation, the
280
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
consciousness, of it, by way of song, that the
next generation sought, by way of sculptural
memorial in marble, and above all, as it seems,
in bronze. The keen demand for athletic
statuary, the honour attached to the artist
employed to make his statue at Olympia, or at
home, bear witness again to the pride with
which a Greek town, the pathos, it might be,
with which a family, looked back to the
victory of one of its members. In the courts of
Olympia a whole population in marble and
bronze gathered quickly, — a world of portraits,
out of which, as the purged and perfected essence,
the ideal soul, of them, emerged the Diadumenus,
tor instance, the Discobolus, the so-called "Jason of
the Louvre. Olympia was in truth, as Pindar
says again, a mother of gold-crowned contests, the
mother of a large offspring. All over Greece
the enthusiasm for gymnastic, for the life of the
gymnasia, prevailed. It was a gymnastic which,
under the happy conditions of that time, was
already surely what Plato pleads for, already one
half music, fiovaiK^, a matter, partly, of character
and of the soul, of the fair proportion between
soul and body, of the soul with itself. Who
can doubt it who sees and considers the still
irresistible grace, the contagious pleasantness, of
the Discobolus, the Diadumenus, and a few other
precious survivals from the athletic age which
immediately preceded the manhood of Pheidias,
between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars ?
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GREEK STUDIES
Now, this predominance of youth, of the
youthful form, in art, of bodily gymnastic pro-
moting natural advantages to the utmost, of the
physical perfection developed thereby, is a sign
that essential mastery has been achieved by the
artist — the power, that is to say, of a full and
free realisation. For such youth, in its very
essence, is a matter properly within the limits of
the visible, the empirical, world ; and in the
presentment of it there will be no place for
symbolic hint, none of that reliance on the help-
ful imagination of the spectator, the legitimate
scope of which is a large one, when art is dealing
with religious objects, with what in the fulness
of its own nature is not really expressible at all.
In any passable representation of the Greek
discobolus^ as in any passable representation of an
English cricketer, there can be no successful
evasion of the natural difficulties of the thing to
be done — the difficulties of competing with
nature itself, or its maker, in that marvellous
combination of motion and rest, of inward
mechanism with the so smoothly finished sur-
face and outline — finished ad unguem — which
enfold it.
Of the gradual development of such mastery
of natural detail, a veritable counterfeit of nature,
the veritable rhythmus of the runner, for example
— twinkling heel and ivory shoulder — we have
hints and traces in the historians of art. One
had attained the very turn and texture of the
282
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
crisp locks, another the very feel of the tense
nerve and full-flushed vein, while with another
you saw the bosom of Ladas expand, the lips
part, as if for a last breath ere he reached the
goal. It was like a child finding little by little
the use of its limbs, the testimony of its senses,
at a definite moment. With all its poetic
impulse, it is an age clearlv of faithful observa-
tion, of what we call realism, alike in its iconic
and heroic work ; alike in portraiture, that is to
say, and in the presentment of divine or abstract
types. Its workmen are close students now of
the living form as such ; aim with success at an
ever larger and more various expression of its
details ; or replace a conventional statement of
them by a real and lively one. That it was thus
is attested indirectly by the fact that they busied
themselves, seemingly by way of a tour de force^
and with no essential interest in such subject,
alien as it was from the pride of health which is
characteristic of the gymnastic life, with the
expression of physical pain, in Philoctetes, for
instance. The adroit, the swift, the strong, in full
and free exercise of their gifts, to the delight of
others and of themselves, though their sculptural
record has for the most part perished, are speci-
fied in ancient literary notices as the sculptor's
favourite subjects, repeated, remodelled, over and
over again, for the adornment of the actual
scene of athletic success, or the market-place at
home of the distant Northern or Sicilian town
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GREEK STUDIES
whence the prizeman had come. — A countless
series of popular illustrations to Pindar's Odes !
And if art was still to minister to the religious
sense, it could only be by clothing celestial spirits
also as nearly as possible in the bodily semblance
of the various athletic combatants, whose patrons
respectively they were supposed to be.
The age to which we are come in the story
of Greek art presents to us indeed only a chapter
of scattered fragments, of names that are little
more, with but surmise of their original signifi-
cance, and mere reasonings as to the sort of art
that may have occupied what are really empty
spaces. Two names, however, connect them-
selves gloriously with certain extant works of
art ; copies, it is true, at various removes, yet
copies of what is still found delightful through
them, and by copyists who for the most part
were themselves masters. Through the varia-
tions of the copyist, the restorer, the mere
imitator, these works are reducible to two famous
original types — the Discobolus or quoit-player, of
Myron, the beau ideal (we may use that term for
once justly) of athletic motion ; and the Diadu-
menus of Polycleitus, as, binding the fillet or
crown of victory upon his head, he presents the
beau ideal of athletic repose, and almost begins to
think.
Myron was a native of Eleutherae, and a pupil
of Ageladas of Argos. There is nothing more
to tell by way of positive detail of this so famous
284
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
artist, save that the main scene of his activity
was Athens, now become the centre of the
artistic as of all other modes of life in Greece.
Multiplicasse veritatem videtur^ says PHny. He
was in fact an earnest realist or naturalist, and
rose to central perfection in the portraiture, the
idealised portraiture, of athletic youth, from a
mastery first of all in the delineation of inferior
objects, of little lifeless or living things. Think,
however, for a moment, how winning such
objects are still, as presented on Greek coins ; —
the ear of corn, for instance, on those of Meta-
pontum ; the microscopic cockle-shell, the
dolphins, on the coins of Syracuse. Myron,
then, passes from pleasant truth of that kind to
the delineation of the worthier sorts of animal
life, — the ox, the dog — to nothing short of
illusion in the treatment of them, as ancient
connoisseurs would have you understand. It is
said that there are thirty-six extant epigrams on
his brazen cow. That animal has her gentle
place in Greek art, from the Siren tomb, suckling
her young there, as the type of eternal rejuven-
escence, onwards to the procession of the Elgin
frieze, where, still breathing deliciously of the
distant pastures, she is led to the altar. We feel
sorry for her, as we look, so lifelike is the carved
marble. The sculptor who worked there, who-
ever he may have been, had profited doubtless
by the study of Myron's famous work. For
what purpose he made it, does not appear ; — as
285
GREEK STUDIES
an architectural ornament ; or a votive offering ;
perhaps only because he liked making it. In
hyperbolic epigram, at any rate, the animal
breathes, explaining sufficiently the point of
Pliny's phrase regarding Myron — Corporum
curiosus. And when he came to his main
business w^ith the quoit-player, the w^restler, the
runner, he did not for a moment forget that they
too were animals, young animals, delighting in
natural motion, in free course through the
yielding air, over uninterrupted space, accord-
ing to Aristotle's definition of pleasure : " the
unhindered exercise of one's natural force."
Corporum tenus curiosus: — he was a "curious
workman" as far as the living body is concerned.
Pliny goes on to qualify that phrase by saying
that he did not express the sensations of the mind
— animi sensus. But just there, in fact, precisely
in such limitation, we find what authenticates
Myron's peculiar value in the evolution of Greek
art. It is of the essence of the athletic prizeman,
involved in the very ideal of the quoit-player,
the cricketer, not to give expression to mind, in
any antagonism to, or invasion of, the body ; to
mind as anything more than a function of the
body, whose healthful balance of functions it
may so easily perturb ; — to disavow that insidious
enemy of the fairness of the bodily soul as such.
Yet if the art of Myron was but little occupied
with the reasonable soul [animus)^ with those
mental situations the expression of which, though
286
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
it may have a pathos and a beauty of its own, is
for the most part adverse to the proper expression
of youth, to the beauty of youth, by causing it
to be no longer youthful, he was certainly a
master of the animal or physical soul there
(anima) ; how it is, how it displays itself, as
illustrated, for instance, in the Discobolus. Of
voluntary animal motion the very soul is un-
doubtedly there. We have but translations into
marble of the original in bronze. In that, it
was as if a blast of cool wind had congealed the
metal, or the living youth, fixed him imperish-
ably in that moment of rest which lies between
two opposed motions, the backward swing of the
right arm, the movement forwards on which the
left foot is in the very act of starting. The
matter of the thing, the stately bronze or marble,
thus rests indeed ; but the artistic form of it, in
truth, scarcely more, even to the eye, than the
rolling ball or disk, may be said to rest, at every
moment of its course, — just metaphysically, you
know.
This mystery of combined motion and rest, of
rest in motion, had involved, of course, on the
part of the sculptor who had mastered its secret,
long and intricate consideration. Archaic as it
is, primitive still in some respects, full of the
primitive youth it celebrates, it is, in fact, a
learned work, and suggested to a great analyst of
literary style, singular as it may seem, the
" elaborate " or " contorted " manner in literature
287
GREEK STUDIES
of the later Latin writers, which, however, he
finds " laudable " for its purpose. Yet with all
its learned involution, thus so oddly characterised
by Quintilian, so entirely is this quality sub-
ordinated to the proper purpose of the Discobolus
as a work of art, a thing to be looked at rather
than to think about, that it makes one exclaim
still, with the poet of athletes, "The natural is
ever best ! " — to he (f>va airav KparicTTov. Perhaps
that triumphant, unimpeachable naturalness is
after all the reason why, on seeing it for the first
time, it suggests no new view of the beauty of
human form, or point of view for the regarding
of it ; is acceptable rather as embodying (say, in
one perfect flower) all one has ever fancied or
seen, in old Greece or on Thames' side, of the
unspoiled body of youth, thus delighting itself
and others, at that perfect, because unconscious,
point of good-fortune, as it moves or rests just
there for a moment, between the animal and
spiritual worlds. " Grant them," you pray in
Pindar's own words, " grant them with feet so
light to pass through life ! "
The face of the young man, as you see him
in the British Museum for instance, with fittingly
inexpressive expression, (look into, look at the
curves of, the blossomlike cavity of the opened
mouth) is beautiful, but not altogether virile.
The eyes, the facial lines which they gather into
one, seem ready to follow the coming motion of
the discus as those of an onlooker might be ;
288
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
but that head does not really belong to the
discobolus. To be assured ot' this you have but
to compare with that version in the British
Museum the most authentic of all derivations
from the original, preserved till lately at the
Palazzo Massimi in Rome. Here, the vigorous
head also, w^ith the face, smooth enough, but
spare, and tightly drawn over muscle and bone,
is sympathetic with, yields itself to, the concen-
tration, in the most literal sense, of all beside ; —
is itself, in very truth, the steady centre of the
discus^ which begins to spin ; as the source ot
will, the source of the motion with which the
discus is already on the wing, — that, and the
entire form. The Discobolus of the Massimi
Palace presents, moreover, in the hair, for in-
stance, those survivals of primitive manner which
would mark legitimately Myron's actual pre-
Pheidiac standpoint ; as they are congruous also
with a certain archaic, a more than merely
athletic, spareness of form generally — delightful
touches of unreality in this realist of a great time,
and of a sort of conventionalism that has an
attraction in itself.
Was it a portrait ? That one can so much as
ask the question is a proof how far the master, in
spite of his lingering archaism, is come already
from the antique marbles of ^gina. Was it the
portrait of one much-admired youth, or rather
the type, the rectified essence, of many such, at
the most pregnant, the essential, moment, of the
u 289
GREEK STUDIES
exercise of their natural powers, of what they
really were ? Have we here, in short, the
sculptor Myron's reasoned memory of many a
quoit-player, of a long flight of quoit-players ;
as, were he here, he might have given us the
cricketer, the passing generation of cricketers,
sub specie eternitatis^ under the eternal form of
art ?
Was it in that case a commemorative or
votive statue, such as Pausanias found scattered
throughout Greece ? Was it, again, designed to
be part only of some larger decorative scheme,
as some have supposed of the Venus of Melos, or
a work of genre as we say, a thing intended
merely to interest, to gratify the taste, with no
further purpose ? In either case it may have re-
presented some legendary quoit-player — Perseus
at play with Acrisius fatally, as one has suggested ;
or Apollo with Hyacinthus, as Ovid describes
him in a work of poetic genre.
And if the Discobolus is, after all, a work of
genre — a work merely imitative of the detail of
actual life — for the adornment of a room in a
private house, it would be only one of many
such produced in Myron's day. It would be, in
fact, one of iht pristce directly attributed to him
by Pliny, little congruous as they may seem with
the grandiose motions of his more characteristic
work. The pristce, the sawyers, — a celebrated
creation of the kind, — is supposed to have given
its name to the whole class of like things. No
290
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
age, indeed, since the rudiments of art were
mastered, can have been without such reproduc-
tions of the pedestrian incidents of every day, for
the mere pleasant exercise at once of the curiosity
of the spectator and the imitative instinct of the
producer. The Terra-Cotta Rooms of the Louvre
and the British Museum are a proof of it. One
such work indeed there is, delightful in itself,
technically exquisite, most interesting by its
history, which properly finds its place beside the
larger, the full-grown, physical perfection of the
Discobolus^ one of whose alert younger brethren
he may be, — the Spinario namely, the boy drawing
a thorn from his foot, preserved in the so rare,
veritable antique bronze at Rome, in the Museum
of the Capitol, and well known in a host of
ancient and modern reproductions.
There, or elsewhere in Rome, tolerated in
the general destruction of ancient sculpture — like
the " Wolf of the Capitol," allowed by way of
heraldic sign, as in modern Siena, or like the
equestrian figure of Marcus Aurelius doing
duty as Charlemagne, — like those, but like very
few other works of the kind, the Spinario re-
mained, well-known and in honour, throughout
the Middle Age. Stories like that of Ladas the
famous runner, who died as he reached the goal
in a glorious foot-race of boys, the subject of a
famous work by Myron himself, (the " last
breath," as you saw, was on the boy's lips) were
told of the half-grown bronze lad at the Capitol.
291
GREEK STUDIES
Of necessity, but fatally, he must pause for a few
moments in his course ; or the course is at
length over, or the breathless journey with some
all-important tidings ; and now, not till now, he
thinks of resting to draw from the sole of his
foot the cruel thorn, driven into it as he ran. In
any case, there he still sits for a moment, for
ever, amid the smiling admiration of centuries,
in the agility, in the perfect naivete also as thus
occupied, of his sixteenth year, to which the
somewhat lengthy or attenuated structure of the
limbs is conformable. And then, in this atten-
uation, in the almost Egyptian proportions, in
the shallowness of the chest and shoulders especi-
ally, in the Phoenician or old Greek sharpness
and length of profile, and the long, conventional,
wire-drawn hair of the boy, arching formally over
the forehead and round the neck, there is some-
thing of archaism, of that archaism which sur-
vives, truly, in Myron's own work, blending with
the grace and power of well-nigh the maturity
of Greek art. The blending of interests, of
artistic alliances, is certainly delightful.
Polycleitus, the other famous name of this
period, and with a fame justified by work we
may still study, at least in its immediate deriva-
tives, had also tried his hand with success in
such subjects. In the Astragalizontes, for instance,
well known to antiquity in countless reproduc-
tions, he had treated an incident of the every-day
life of every age, which Plato sketches by the way.
292
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
Myron, by patience of genius, had mastered
the secret of the expression of movement, had
plucked out the very heart of its mystery. Poly-
cleitus, on the other hand, is above all the master
of rest, of the expression of rest after toil, in
the victorious and crowned athlete, Diadumenus.
In many slightly varying forms, marble versions
of the original in bronze of Delos, the T)ia-
dumenus^ indifferently, mechanically, is binding
round his head a ribbon or fillet. In the Vaison
copy at the British Museum it was of silver.
That simple fillet is, in fact, a diadem^ a crown,
and he assumes it as a victor ; but, as I said,
mechanically, and, prize in hand, might be
asking himself whether after all it had been
worth while. For the active beauty of the
Agonistes of which Myron's art is full, we have
here, then, the passive beauty of the victor.
But the later incident, the realisation of rest, is
actually in affinity with a certain earliness, so to
call it, in the temper and work of Polycleitus.
He is already something of a reactionary ; or
pauses, rather, to enjoy, to convey enjoyably to
others, the full savour of a particular moment
in the development of his craft, the moment of
the perfecting of restful form, before the mere
consciousness of technical mastery in delineation
urges forward the art of sculpture to a bewildering
infinitude of motion. In opposition to the ease,
the freedom, of others, his aim is, by a voluntary
restraint in the exercise of such technical mastery,
293
GREEK STUDIES
to achieve nothing less than the impeccable,
within certain narrow limits. He still hesitates,
is self-exacting, seems even to have checked a
growing readiness of hand in the artists about
him. He was renowned as a graver, found
much to do with the chisel, introducing many a
fine after-thought, when the rough-casting of his
work was over. He studied human form under
such conditions as would bring out its natural
features, its static laws, in their entirety, their
harmony ; and in an academic work, so to speak,
no longer to be clearly identified in what may be
derivations from it, he claimed to have fixed the
canon, the common measure, of perfect man.
Yet with Polycleitus certainly the measure of
man was not yet " the measure of an angel," but
still only that of mortal youth ; of youth, how-
ever, in that scrupulous and uncontaminate purity
of form which recommended itself even to the
Greeks as befitting messengers from the gods, if
such messengers should come.
And yet a large part of Myron's contemporary
fame depended on his religious work — on his
statue of Here, for instance, in ivory and gold —
that too, doubtless, expressive, as appropriately
to its subject as to himself, of a passive beauty.
We see it still, perhaps, in the coins of Argos.
And has not the crowned victor, too, in that
mechanic action, in his demure attitude, some-
thing which reminds us of the religious signifi-
cance of the Greek athletic service ? It was a
294
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
sort of worship, you know — that department of
public life ; such worship as Greece, still in its
superficial youth, found itself best capable of.
At least those solemn contests began and ended
with prayer and sacrifice. Their most honoured
prizes were a kind of religiously symbolical
objects. The athletic life certainly breathes of
abstinence, of rule and the keeping under of
one's self. And here in the Diadumenus we have
one of its priests, a priest of the religion whose
central motive was what has been called " the
worship of the body," — its modest priest.
The so-called 'Jason at the Louvre, the Apoxyo-
menus, and a certain number of others you will
meet with from time to time — whatever be the
age and derivation of the actual marble which
reproduced for Rome, for Africa, or Gaul, types
that can have had their first origin in one only
time and place — belong, at least aesthetically, to
this group, together with the Adorante of Berlin,
Winckelmann's antique favourite, who with up-
lifted face and hands seems to be indeed in
prayer, looks immaculate enough to be interced-
ing for others. As to the "Jason of the Louvre,
one asks at first sight of him, as he stoops to
make fast the sandal on his foot, whether the
young man can be already so marked a personage.
Is he already the approved hero, bent on some
great act of his famous epopee ; or mere youth
only, again, arraying itself mechanically, but alert
in eye and soul, prompt to be roused to any
295
GREEK STUDIES
great action whatever ? The vaguely opened
lips certainly suggest the latter vievvr ; if indeed
the body and the head (in a different sort
of marble) really belong to one another. Ah !
the more closely you consider the fragments of
antiquity, those stray letters of the old Greek
aesthetic alphabet, the less positive will your
conclusions become, because less conclusive the
data regarding artistic origin and purpose. Set
here also, however, to the end that in a con-
gruous atmosphere, in a real perspective, they
may assume their full moral and aesthetic ex-
pression, whatever of like spirit you may come
upon in Greek or any other work, remembering
that in England also, in Oxford, we have still,
for any master of such art that may be given us,
subjects truly " made to his hand."
As with these, so with their prototypes at
Olympia, or at the Isthmus, above all perhaps in
the Diadumenus of Polycleitus, a certain melan-
choly (a pagan melancholy, it may be rightly
called, even when we detect it in our English
youth) is blent with the final impression we
retain of them. They are at play indeed, in the
sun ; but a little cloud passes over it now and
then ; and just because of them, because they
are there, the whole aspect of the place is
chilled suddenly, beyond what one could have
thought possible, into what seems, nevertheless,
to be the proper and permanent light of day.
For though they pass on from age to age the
296
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
type of what is pleasantest to look on, which,
as type, is indeed eternal, it is, ot course, but
for an hour that it rests with any one of them
individually. Assuredly they have no maladies
of soul any more than of the body — Animi scnsus
noil expressit. But it they are not yet think-
ing, there is the capacity of thought, of painful
thought, in them, as they seem to be aware
wistfully. In the Diadiwienus of Polycleitus this
expression allies itself to the long-drawn facial
type of his preference, to be found also in an-
other very different subject, the ideal of which
he fixed in Greek sculpture — the would-be virile
Amazon, in exquisite pain, alike of body and
soul — the "Wounded Amazon." We may be
reminded that in the first mention of athletic
contests in Greek literature — in the twenty-third
book of the Iliad — they form part of the funeral
rites of the hero Patroclus.
It is thus, though but in the faintest degree,
even with the veritable prince of that world of
antique bronze and marble, the Discobolus at
Rest of the Vatican, which might well be set
where Winckelmann set the Adorante^ represent-
ing as it probably does, the original of Alca-
menes, in whom, a generation after Pheidias, an
earlier and more earnest spirit still survived.
Although the crisply trimmed head may seem a
little too small to our, perhaps not quite right-
ful, eyes, we might accept him for that canon,
or measure, of the perfect human form, which
297
GREEK STUDIES
Polycleitus had proposed. He is neither the
victor at rest, as with Polycleitus, nor the com-
batant already in motion, as with Myron ; but,
as if stepping backward from Myron's precise
point of interest, and with the heavy discus still
in the left hand, he is preparing for his venture,
taking stand carefully on the right foot. Eye
and mind concentre, loyally, entirely, upon the
business in hand. The very finger is reckon-
ing while he watches, intent upon the cast of
another, as the metal glides to the goal. Take
him, to lead you forth quite out of the narrow
limits of the Greek world. You have pure
humanity there, with a glowing, yet restrained
joy and delight in itself, but without vanity ;
and it is pure. There is nothing certainly
supersensual in that fair, round head, any more
than in the long, agile limbs ; but also no
impediment, natural or acquired. To have
achieved just that, was the Greek*s truest claim
for furtherance in the main line of human
development. He had been faithful, we cannot
help saying, as we pass from that youthful
company, in what comparatively is perhaps
little — in the culture, the administration, of the
visible world ; and he merited, so we might go
on to say — he merited Revelation, something
which should solace his heart in the inevitable
fading of that. We are reminded of those
strange prophetic words of the Wisdom, the
Logos, by whom God made the world, in one of
298
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
the sapientidl, half-Platonic books of the Hebrew
Scriptures : — " I was by him, as one brought up
with him ; rejoicing in the habitable parts of
the earth. My delights were with the sons of
men."
THE END
PriHttdhy R. & R. Ci^SK, Limited, Edinturgh.
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IV. IMAGINARY PORTRAITS.
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Lectures.
VII. GREEK STUDIES. A Series of Essays.
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X. ESSAYS FROM "THE GUARDIAN."
MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON.
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